The one-day animation at the Barrow Sea Ice Radar website show the rapid loss of shorefast ice that stranded a number of Barrow whalers on the ice yesterday. http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_radar

My concern with how the public, and even many parts of the scientific community, view the loss of summer ice is that it is looked on as being a physical loss and not the disruption and destruction of an ecosystem. I study seabirds on an island off northern Alaska where in the past forty years I have seen the shift in the marine ecosystem with earlier and increasing ice retreat. http://cooperisland.org/ While the public may see that polar bears are being displaced by melting ice they fail to view the recent unprecedented loss of sea ice as the same type of large-scale ecosystem loss occurring with tropical rain forests. While there are now major efforts to study the little-known pack-ice ecosystem, it is too late to examine it in an undisturbed state. We can only get a snapshot of what is like during a period of decline before the loss of summer ice. The recent Beaufort Sea ice event (and the attention it was getting) caused me to put together this video showing the location of my research as well as an excellent graphic from the Arctic Council showing the pack ice ecosystem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdnposPoYoI