Arctic Sea Ice Update: Mid-January 2026

Wherefore art thou, ice of old?

With about about two months to go until the Arctic-wide maximum sea ice extent is reached, extent remains very low. As of January 15, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Sea Ice Index and the U.S. National Ice Center/NSIDC Multisensor Analyzed Sea Ice Extent (MASIE) showed the fourth lowest extent for the date, EUMETSAT OSI SAF third lowest, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) second lowest. Total ice extent has been at or close to the lowest on record (since 1978-79) since early November (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Arctic-wide daily sea ice extent October 2025 through January 15, 2026. Data from the NSIDC Sea Ice Index version 4.

The spatial distribution of sea ice (Fig. 2) shows considerable ice on the east side of Greenland, with the pack ice edge only about 150 km from the northwest coast of Iceland. In contrast, on the west side of Greenland, open water in Baffin Bay extends to almost 75°N. In the Bering Sea, recent cold weather on the Alaska side has pushed/formed ice south of the long term median ice edge, but there is very little ice on the Russian side of the Bering Sea except in the Gulf of Anadyr.

Fig. 2 Sea ice concentration as of January 15, 2026 from AMSR2. Data courtesy U. Bremen.

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Regional sea ice extent ranks

Mid-January regional extent of sea ice relative to the past does not show the same coherence as is often the case in the summer and fall. For example, while extent is quite low in the Barents Sea and Baffin Bay, Greenland Sea ice extent is higher than most years at this point in the season. Similarly, on the Pacific side of the Arctic, Bering Sea ice extent is close to average but the extent in Sea of Okhotsk is lower than all but four years since 1979.

Fig. 3. Regional sea ice extent rankings for January 15, 2026 with 1 the lowest and 48 the highest in the 1979-2026 period of record. Seas marked as “NA” are seasonally ice covered. Data and base graphic courtesy NSIDC.

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Sea Ice Thickness and Volume

Sea ice thickness as modeled by the Danish Meteorological Institute (Fig. 4) shows ice less than about two meters thick everywhere except in a fairly narrow zone from the northern Greenland coast southwestward along the northern coast of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to the eastern Beaufort Sea. Total Arctic sea ice volume from this model is the lowest of record, even lower than last year and about 20 percent lower than the ice volume in mid-January 2024.

Fig. 4 Modeled sea ice thickness (meters) as of January 15, 2026. Image courtesy Danish Meteorological Institute.

The thicker ice shown in Fig. 4 on the east side Greenland is moving south in the Transpolar Drift Current (Fig. 5) and is destined to melt away in the North Atlantic in the coming months.

Fig. 5 Sea ice drift vectors for mid-January, 2026. Analysis and graphic courtesy EUMETSAT OSI SAF.

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Technical details and underlying data sources

As usual in this newsletter, Arctic means “poleward of 60°N” except for sea ice, where “Arctic” means all northern hemisphere sea ice.

NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice information, graphics and data available here.

Products from the OSI SAF High Latitude Processing Center (including but not limited to sea ice) are available here.

Arctic-wide sea ice extent data is available from JAXA here.

MASIE information and data available from NSIDC here.

AMSR2 data and graphics available from U. Bremen here.

Modeled sea ice thickness and volume from the Danish Meteorological Institute is available here.