The team’s white paper shows characteristics that improve legibility. Image: MIT AgeLab/Monotype Imaging

Scientists at CERN learned that the hard way that font choice is important after they were roundly mocked for using Comic Sans in their presentation on the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. But in some situations—a fast-moving car, for instance—proper font choices can not only save you from ridicule, they could also save your life.

Working with text and graphic company Monotype Imaging, scientists at MIT’s AgeLab (the outfit responsible for the age empathy suit) looked at what worked and what didn’t in fonts used in car displays, like GPS. They found that, when they made the letters cleaner and more easily distinguishable, men spent 10.6 percent less time looking at the screen. That’s a significant difference, and it represents time that can be spent watching the road instead of the dashboard. Women, interestingly enough, were not affected by the font change.

So what does this mean for your car? Not much yet. But in an article for Popular Science, David Gould, Monotype’s director of product marketing, said the company was pitching the idea to carmakers. They just need to find a font that works better and fits the image their products project :

Reimer and Gould have already taken these findings to Detroit to share them with carmakers, and this research could have equal application for cell phone or other device manufacturers. All of these companies could use either an existing humanist typeface, or design new ones based on these same principles of legibility. Carmakers, Gould suspects, will likely want to find typefaces that communicate a unified sense of their brand. This sounds a little surprising. But, yes, the text on your dashboard LCD display is an integral part of the design of your car’s interior, too.

“Automobile companies are very big on their brand,” Gould says. “When you get in that car, you need to feel and have that emotion in that particular vehicle. They want to make sure that’s consistently represented on everything in the car, including on the screen.”

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It has been a dry year for most of the United States, and, in the animation above, you can see how the groundwater levels in the United States have been affected by the drought that affects large parts of the country. The animation starts in 2002 and goes through a decade of changes, so watch carefully for the last few seconds to get a good idea of what’s going on now.

Scientists created the maps by using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, a set-up that consists of two satellites that measure the Earth’s gravity field. Gravity is related to mass, and water reservoirs (both surface and groundwater) have enough mass to affect the gravitational field of the earth.

The effect is very small, but significant enough that GRACE can pick up on the changes as water dries up (or rains down). The instrument is sensitive enough to pick up and differentiate between moisture in less than an inch of soil (the surface zone), moisture in the ground down to 39 inches (the root zone) and water in the aquifers below that.

The image from NASA, below, shows the differences between the three. Look at Texas, where the soil moisture is doing ok, but the groundwater is devastated. The state might have had some rain recently, but not enough to make up for the serious problems with groundwater.

Maps by Chris Poulsen, National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, based on data from Matt Rodell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the GRACE science team.

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‘The Hope among loose ice, March 16th, 1880. Image: Conan Doyle Estate Ltd

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his novels about a certain Mr. Holmes, who keeps popping up in movies and TV shows. Conan Doyle’s most famous character may have inspired period-themed pilgrimages to Switzerland, but his author enjoyed a rather different kind of travel. When he was a 20-year-old medical student, Conan Doyle became the ship’s surgeon on board a whaling ship, the Hope.

Like any good writer, Conan Doyle kept notes while on board, and this week, the British Library published his journals from his voyage to the Arctic. The book contains full color images of the diary, as well as photographs from the expedition, and a few of the fiction stories that were inspired by the trip.

The diary isn’t for the faint of heart. Conan Doyle described the hunting of seals and whales in gruesome detail. From a Daily Mail review of the book:

Conan Doyle reported seeing millions of seals, and it was no exaggeration. ‘They look a sort of cross between a lamb and a gigantic slug,’ he wrote. ‘On the 3rd, the bloody work began and has gone on ever since. The mothers are shot and the little ones have their brains knocked out with spiked clubs.’

Depressing stuff. But it’s not all blood and gore: the sketches are really lovely.

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Sherlock Holmes and the Tools of Deduction
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A Modern Sherlock Holmes and the Technology of Deduction

A bog oak floor. Image: SEIER+SEIER

A 44-foot-long piece of a 5,000 year old tree trunk was uncovered on September 25 in the U.K. The BBC reports that it was unearthed from a bog in Norfolk.

After marinating for thousands of years underwater and then seasoning for months in a kiln, bog oak and other kinds of bog woods take on a distinctive color and durability that’s highly prized by artists and carpenters the world over. The many years underground tend to dye the wood a deep brown, almost black color.

The part of the tree that was uncovered in Norfolk didn’t appear to have roots or branches, leading those involved to conclude that the tree itself might have been four times as large.

The planks from the tree trunk found in the UK will stay in a kiln until April 2013, when carpenter Hamish Low will attempt to build a 44-foot-long table and set it out for public display in honor of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The people working on the project have even set up a Twitter page where people can follow their progress. Expect pictures and tweets like: “A gigantic 5,000 year old oak tree. An extraordinary challenge. An unprecedented masterpiece. A gift to the nation.”

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The Tallest, Strongest and Most Iconic Trees in the World
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A map of the earthquakes triggered around the globe within a week of the April 2012 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra (white star). Courtesy of Fred Pollitz, USGS

The largest earthquake of the year left quite an impression on the earth, but not via mass destruction or tsunamis. In fact, you probably didn’t even hear about it. The 8.7 magnitude earthquake struck on April 11 in the Indian Ocean. Two people are known to have died as a result of the quake, while eight others died of heart attacks.

The quake lasted for 2 minutes and 40 seconds and inspired many scientific studies, including two published today in Nature. In the first, scientists at UC Berkeley announced that the earthquake triggered numerous others as far away as Baja California, almost a week after the original. The scientists announced that they found five times the expected number of earthquakes in the six days afer the event.

“Until now, we seismologists have always said, ‘Don’t worry about distant earthquakes triggering local quakes,’” co-author Roland Burgmann, professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, said in a statement. “This study now says that, while it is very rare – it may only happen every few decades – it is a real possibility if the right kind of earthquake happens.”

Burgmann calls this quake “one of the weirdest…we have ever seen.” It was the same type of earthquake as caused the 1906 San Francisco disaster—which the U.S. Geological Survey calls “one of the most significant earthquakes of all time”—only fifteen times “more energetic,” according to Burgmann.

“It wasn’t a single fault that produced the quake, it was a crisscrossing of three or four faults that all ruptured in sequence to make such a big earthquake, and they ruptured deep,” he said.

This map of the Indian Ocean region shows boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates in the area, and the epicenters (red stars) of two great earthquakes that happened April 11, 2012.
Photo Credit: Keith Koper, University of Utah Seismograph Stations

That weird nature of the earthquake was the subject of the second Nature paper, authored by scientists at the University of Utah and UC Santa Cruz. They found that the earthquake was part of a much larger process, the breakup of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate into at least two pieces.

“We’ve never seen an earthquake like this,” study co-author Keith Koper, an associate professor geophysics at the University of Utah said in a statement. “This is part of the messy business of breaking up a plate. … This is a geologic process. It will take millions of years to form a new plate boundary and, most likely, it will take thousands of similar large quakes for that to happen.”

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Chilean Earthquake Moved City Ten Feet
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Captured Swainson’s thrush wearing a geolocator. Photo credit: Kira Delmore, UBC

The continental divide doesn’t just apply to water anymore. Scientists in British Columbia attached tiny “backpacks” to birds and mapped their winter migration from Canada to Central America and back again.

What they found was surprising. They tagged two different subspecies of Swainson’s thrush, both of which live in British Columbia, with small geolocators. Though the subspecies are closely related and don’t live that far apart, they took two very different paths down towards their summer homes. One took the coast road, skirting the Pacific, while the other went towards the other side of the Rocky Mountains, right through middle America.

Map of diverging migration routes in fall (top) and spring. Cool colours represent coastal subspecies, warm colours inland species. Dashed lines represent dates around the equinox where researchers were unable to estimate latitude. Image: University of British Columbia

The stark contrast between the two has scientists wondering what would happen if the two subspecies mated to create hybrids. In the press release released by the researchers, one scientist says:

“Given that migratory behavior is under genetic influence in many species of birds, these results raise the question of what hybrids between these two subspecies would do,” says Darren Irwin, associate professor of Zoology at UBC and co-author of the paper. “One possibility is that hybrids would take an intermediate route, leading to more difficulties during migration. If so, the migratory differences might be preventing the two forms from blending into one.”

The geolocators carried by the birds are about the size and weight of a penny, and track the bird’s location by measuring the sunrise and sunset times each day. With that data, scientists could figure out the exact position of the bird, though figuring out their precise latitude became difficult around the equinox (when the length of night and day are approximately equal).

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Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Flickr user James Gordon

War zones are dangerous places, for both people and cultural heritage. Lately, Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt have endured high-profile looting or looting attempts on archaeological sites and museums. Now, Syria has joined the inglorious list as priceless artifacts are being stolen, smuggled and even traded for weapons.

Interpol has gotten involved. The situation got to a point where they posted this warning in May:

The on-going armed conflict in Syria is increasingly threatening a significant part of the cultural heritage of mankind. Roman ruins, archaeological sites, historic premises and places of worship are particularly vulnerable to destruction, damages, theft and looting during this period of turmoil.

The INTERPOL General Secretariat therefore joins UNESCO’s warning of the imminent threats to which Syrian cultural heritage is currently exposed and is strengthening its co-operation with other international partner organizations for a coordinated response to this menace.

Meanace, indeed. The notice was posted as part of an appeal for the return of a group of mosaics looted from the Roman ruins of Apamea, near Hama.

An article in Time paints a vivid picture of how Syrian artifacts are being used as fodder for the war machine:

Abu Khaled knows the worth of things. As a small-time smuggler living along the porous border between Syria and Lebanon, he has dabbled in antiquities as much as the cigarettes, stolen goods and weapons that make up the bulk of his trade. So when a smuggler from Syria brought him a small, alabaster statue of a seated man a few weeks ago, he figured that the carving, most likely looted from one of Syria’s two dozen heritage museums or one of its hundreds of archaeological sites, could be worth a couple thousand dollars in Lebanon’s antiquities black market. So he called his contacts in Beirut. But instead of asking for cash, he asked for something even more valuable: weapons.

“War is good for us,” he says of the community of smugglers that regularly transit the nearby border. “We buy antiquities cheap, and then sell weapons expensively.” That business, he says, is about to get better. Fighters allied with the Free Syrian Army units battling the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad have told him that they are developing an association of diggers dedicated to finding antiquities in order to fund the revolution. “The rebels need weapons, and antiquities are an easy way to buy them,” says Abu Khaled.

But it isn’t just the rebels accused of stealing, as an article from the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports:

In Reyhanli, a small Turkish village near the border with Syria, a newly arrived Syrian refugee from the famed ancient desert town of Palmyra told AFP that the museum there had been looted and reported large-scale theft at the site.

“These are the shabiha, the Assad gangs (militiamen) who do this,” charged Abu Jabal, giving a fictitious name. “The army is there, and oversees everything.” An amateur video posted online on August 17 shows seven or eight sculptures and busts crammed into the back of a pick-up truck. Soldiers can be seen chatting alongside the vehicle.

“We have studied what our Syrian colleagues are saying, and it is indeed soldiers. Everything leads us to believe that the army is stealing antiquities in Palmyra and elsewhere,” Spanish archaeologist Rodrigo Martin told AFP.

It seems that in Syria, unlike Egypt, neither government nor rebel is willing to protect Syria’s treasures.

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If Syria Uses Chemical Weapons, Here’s How They’ll Work
In 2010 $600 Million in Guns and Ammo Were Exported from the US
Looting Iraq
Looting Mali’s History

Little brown bat with white nose syndrome. Image: Jonathan Mays, Wildlife Biologist, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife

White Nose Syndrome, a fungal disease, is decimating the bat population in the eastern United States. Since it was first noticed in 2006, it has killed millions of bats.

One conservation group, the Nature Conservancy, has decided to take action by setting up a refugee bat cave, building a massive concrete bunker underground in Tennessee. Normally, hibernating bats take their winter’s rest in natural caves, but the disease has turned these caves into virtual killing fields as the contagion sweeps through.

The New York Times profiled the project:

In Tennessee, a state with 10,000 caves and 16 species of bats, about half of them hibernating, Bellamy [cave] is something special. It is the winter home, or hibernaculum, to 270,000 gray bats, listed as endangered partly because the entire species hibernates in only nine caves, three of those in Tennessee. “This is a species that could wink out in a few years,” Mr. Holliday said.

So he and the Nature Conservancy decided it was time to dig in, literally. They built an artificial cave, roughly 80 feet long and 16 feet wide, with 11-foot ceilings. Completed this month, and buried under four feet of earth, it lies on a slope about 100 yards from Bellamy Cave’s entrance.

The conservancy is betting $300,000 in private funds (some still to be raised) on the cave, a concrete bunker equipped with cameras and a temperature monitor. Most important, it can be scoured each spring after the bats leave, something that cannot be done in the complex ecosystem of a natural cave.

Scientists hope that by cleaning the cave, they can eradicate the fungus before it gets entrenched in the cave, preventing the kinds of massive bat kills that have occurred in the past. But first they have to persuade the bats to move in.

In an NPR interview Holliday said that he hoped to eventually have as many as 200,000 bats living in the artificial cave. He plans to tempt them to visit by using “ultrasonic bat calls from around the entrance area”

In a video made for the Nature Conservancy, Holliday mentions why we should be pulling for the bats:

“Bats are kind of an underdog. It’s the classic American fighter story, everyone wants to root for the underdog, and they need a little help right now.”

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Are Spelunkers Carrying the White-Nose Fungus?
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Smithsonian To Create First Ever Captive Population of Endangered Bat

Traffic in Sao Paolo. Photo: Flickr user scribbletaylor

Fabiana Crespo met her husband while sitting in traffic:

“I was with a friend in my car and he was in his car also with a friend. In the stop and go of the traffic jam we started driving side by side and then he started looking at me,” says Crespo.

After some flirting through the car windows, Mauricio managed to convince Fabiana to give him her phone number. He called, and an enduring love story began.”I think this is the only thing we can’t complain about in Sao Paulo’s traffic”, she says.

This is the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where the BBC reports that, in the city of 11 million, traffic jams average 112 miles long on Friday evenings. It can even stretch to 183 miles on particularly bad days. With so much time spent in cars, it’s inevitable that life events like meeting your future spouse occur there too.

IBM’s annual Commuter Pain Survey (which did not include Sao Paulo) awarded Mexico City the ‘most painful’ ranking:

The index is comprised of 10 issues: 1) commuting time, 2) time stuck in traffic, agreement that: 3) price of gas is already too high, 4) traffic has gotten worse, 5) start-stop traffic is a problem, 6) driving causes stress, 7) driving causes anger, 8) traffic affects work, 9) traffic so bad driving stopped, and 10) decided not to make trip due to traffic.

Mexico City scored the worst overall, and Sao Paulo’s traffic jams may cover the longest distance. The record for worst traffic jam ever, though, goes to China.

In 2010, China hosted a 74-mile long, 11 day traffic jam that stretched from Beijing towards Mongolia. Drivers started measuring distance in miles/day. Think about that the next time you’re stuck.

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At sea off Waimanalo, a 4×4′ plastic bin is towed in the Makai Pier. Photo: Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory.

A dock 30-by-50 feet long, with Japanese writing on it, was found floating off the coast of Hawaii, around the same time that a plastic blue bin (a seafood storage container in its past life) became the first confirmed piece of tsunami debris to reach Hawaii.

Authorities have not confirmed whether or not the dock was part of the debris that has been floating away from Japan since the tsunami struck in March 2011. But it is very similar to a dock that washed up in Oregon in June.

The docks are just a few of the weird bits of flotsam and jetsam that have journeyed across the Pacific in the wake of the disaster:

• A soccer ball that made it to Alaska was returned to its owner in Japan. It belonged to a 16-year-old that had lost everything in the tsunami.
• A 164-foot ship, the Ryou-Un Maru, was found floating off the Alaskan coast without anyone on board. The U.S. Coast Guard sunk it.
• In British Columbia huge pieces of Styrofoam dot the beaches. And Japanese writing on some of the bottles has led some locals to attribute the debris to the tsunami.
• A Canadian museum has even launched a Facebook page and is encouraging people to photograph debris they find that might be tsunami related.

More debris is likely to appear as ocean currents slowly bring the bits and pieces to shore, and Pacific Coast states are bracing for impact.

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The Science Behind the Japanese Earthquake
Did Broken Buoys Fail to Warn Victims of the Mentawai Tsunami?

Image Credit: Nils Rinaldi via Flickr

The National Institutes of Health has retired 110 chimpanzees of a total of 563 in its chimp research lab. The Washington Post reports that animal activists are pleased by the move:

“We’re very pleased. It’s a good number; 110 is a large number to retire,” said Wayne A. Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, which advocates ending all invasive medical research on chimpanzees.

 In 2009, the group released a video made at New Iberia documenting what Pacelle calls unacceptable treatment of chimpanzees. “Some of the chimps had gone mad; they were obviously emotionally disturbed from long-term isolation and throwing themselves around cages,” Pacelle said. The video also showed chimpanzees being anaesthetized with dart guns and falling from tables onto the floor.

 The NIH isn’t giving up on chimpanzee research entirely. In the same article, NIH director Francis Collins said that some animals would be kept for research in the event of extenuating circumstances, such as an outbreak that affects both chimpanzees and humans.

Ten chimpanzees of the 110 will be moved to a sanctuary in Louisiana, while the other 100 will go into a semi-retirement in the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio. Scientific American reported that while these 100 “will be off limits for invasive research but accessible for behavioral studies and research using information collected through routine veterinary care.”

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Credit: Ewan Traveler

Scientists are starting to speak publicly about a lurking menace. This danger hovers in the background, silently stealing valuable resources from medical machinery.

The dastardly culprit? Helium balloons.

Yes, the innocuous brightly-colored harbingers of joy that adorn birthday parties are, according to some scientists, a public menace.

While helium is used in medical machines like MRIs as well as industrial tools, like welders, people are most familiar with it as force behind levitating party decorations. But with helium reserves running low, some scientists are calling for drastic measures, including the reduction of balloon use.

Nobel Prize winner Robert Richardson has been calling for a reduction for years now. UK Professor Tom Welton agrees, as he told the BBC:

“The reason that we can do MRI is we have very large, very cold magnets – and the reason we can have those is we have helium cooling them down.”You’re not going into an MRI scanner because you’ve got a sore toe – this is important stuff.” When you see that we’re literally just letting it float into the air, and then out into space inside those helium balloons, it’s just hugely frustrating. It is absolutely the wrong use of helium.”

Helium is mined as a byproduct of natural gas production. Pockets of the gas have gathered in the crust over millions of years, but like any finite resource, they are slowly running out. The U.S. has a large portion of these reserves, but our supply isn’t unlimited.

An article from the Deseret News explains the history of helium storage in the United States:

“The Federal Helium Reserve currently supplies 42 percent of the nation’s helium and about one-third of the world’s demand…

The U.S. Navy began storing billions of cubic feet of helium in the Federal Helium Reserve decades ago at a time when dirigibles and barrage balloons were major military assets. In 1996, Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act that gave the BLM management authority over the helium reserve. The agency was directed to begin selling the gas to private industry, a move aimed at paying off $1.3 billion in debt associated with the helium reserve.”

And a future without helium-filled balloons isn’t that far away. The shortage is already having a significant impact on small businesses. The owner of a party story in Cumbria, U.K., lamented the shortage to a local newspaper:

“Helium is massively important to the business, a party without balloons is like roast beef without Yorkshire pudding.”

In Ohio, party stores are setting limits on the number of balloons customers can buy. In Boardman, Ohio, a store limits customers to 12 balloons per visit, and in Springboro, store owner Mark Specht laments to the Dayton Daily News that prices have gone up by 145 percent in the past five months:

“I’ve done this for 24 years and this is the worst it has ever been,” Specht said. “When we do corporate or wedding décor, we’re trying to promote air-filled designs and products because helium is just getting so darn expensive.”

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Image: Flickr user Ray Tsang

Weather Underground’s resident weather historian Christopher Burt posted a fantastic description of how an international group of scholars disproved a 90-year-old thermometer reading, which registered the hottest temperature ever recorded.

This might seem like an impossible task at the best of times: The temperature (136.4 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded in Libya in 1922, and all the records were in Libya. But the research was made even more difficult by the timing. The scholars were conducting their investigation at the same time the recent revolution was ramping up in Libya.

Khalid Ibrahim El Fadli, the director of the climate department at the Libyan National Meteorological Center, located the records but was unable to talk to his international collaborators for six months during 2011, as the Libyan government had shut down outside communication.

From Burt’s post:

We didn’t hear again from El Fadli until August 2011 when the revolutionary forces closed in on Tripoli. One of our committee members, Dr. Manola Brunet (WMO chair of the Open Programme Area Group on Monitoring and Analysis of Climate Variability and Change), who knew El Fadli personally, had up until then been unable to contact him by phone or email. Then on August 13, 2011, we received our first email from El Fadli.

It turned out that all through this period, El Fadli had had access to the Internet through his office’s satellite connection. “But using such posed serious dangers, if anyone discovered me I would probably lose my life. Hence, I never used that connection,” he wrote to his collaborators. At the same time, he was dealing with shortages of basic supplies and the dangers of the security situation—at one point, he wrote, his car came under fire.

Fortunately, El Fadli survived, and once the records were analyzed, the World Meteorological Association found that the reading was invalid. The investigators think that the culprit was an observer who didn’t know how to read the thermometer.

From the paper:

“This committee identified five major concerns with the 1922 El Azizia temperature extreme record, specifically (a) potentially problematical instrumentation, (b) a probable new and inexperienced observer at time of observation, (c) unrepresentative microclimate of the observation site, (d) poor correspondence of the extreme to other locations and (e) poor comparison to subsequent temperature values recorded at the site. Based on these concerns, the WMO World Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes has rejected this temperature extreme of 58°C as the highest temperature officially recorded on the planet. The WMO assessment is that the highest recorded surface temperature of 56.7°C (134°F) was measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch (Death Valley) CA USA.”

That might not be the end of the story though. Burt expresses skepticism at the Death Valley measurement as well. A detective’s work is never done.

Thanks to Highly Allochthonous for tweeting about the blog post.

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Images of the fossilized wood, and where it was found. Image: Wolfe et Al

A long time ago, in a place not that far away, there was a tree. It was just a normal tree, hanging out in the forest with its tree friends, not doing much except photosynthesizing, imbibing in groundwater and growing. Pretty typical tree activities.

Then the world exploded.

A column of magma had worked its way up from the mantle and drilled its way to the surface, bedazzling itself with diamonds that it picked up along the way. It reached the surface in an explosion that blew up the tree’s happy home and sucked the tree itself (or the bits of it that were left) down 984 feet beneath the surface of the earth before entombing it, along with diamonds in a matrix of kimberlite.

53 million years later, a piece of that tree was recovered from that carrot-shaped deposit in remarkable condition. A group of geologists described the find in a study published in PLoS ONE. There was enough of the tree left, including beautifully preserved cell walls, for the scientists to determine that it was a type of tree called a metasequoia.

The piece of wood also contained amber (fossilized tree resin), and, even more exciting, cellulose. The authors believe that it is the “oldest verified instance of α-cellulose preservation to date,” which is pretty incredible, considering how long ago the tree lived (and died).

By looking at the wood, they were able to draw conclusions about the climate that the tree lived in:

“In the Early Eocene, immediately following peak Cenozoic warmth driven by enhanced greenhouse gas forcing [43], the subarctic latitudes of the Slave Province harbored Metasequoia in forests developed under conditions 12–17°C warmer and four times wetter than at present.”

It makes sense that there would be arctic redwood forests at that period, given that around the same time, there were palm trees in Antarctica. But determining the paleo-climates of the Canadian north is made more difficult by the fact that most of the evidence left in the area has been scraped away by repeated glaciations, making the diamond mines of the northwest precious to geologists in more ways than one.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Ancient Climate Change Meant Antarctica Was Once Covered with Palm Trees
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Sea Ice Extent Image Credit: NASA

On September 16, sea ice reached record lows in the Arctic. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that sea ice in the region reached its annual minimum, covering an area of just 3.41 million square kilometers or 1.32 million square miles.

That might seem like a lot, but the NSIDC says that the amount is, in fact the “lowest summer minimum extent in the satellite record.” (Record-keeping began in 1979.)

Their findings are preliminary, and there won’t be a full report until October, so there is the potential that the area of sea ice could decrease even further.

From the NSIDC website:

“Overall there was a loss of 11.83 million square kilometers (4.57 million square miles) of ice since the maximum extent occurred on March 20, 2012, which is the largest summer ice extent loss in the satellite record, more than one million square kilometers greater than in any previous year.”

Image Credit: NSIDC

In a NASA press release, they explain why this year has been particularly bad:

This year, a powerful cyclone formed off the coast of Alaska and moved on Aug. 5 to the center of the Arctic Ocean, where it churned the weakened ice cover for several days. The storm cut off a large section of sea ice north of the Chukchi Sea and pushed it south to warmer waters that made it melt entirely. It also broke vast extensions of ice into smaller pieces more likely to melt.

“The storm definitely seems to have played a role in this year’s unusually large retreat of the ice”, [climate scientist Claire] Parkinson said in a statement. “But that exact same storm, had it occurred decades ago when the ice was thicker and more extensive, likely wouldn’t have had as prominent an impact, because the ice wasn’t as vulnerable then as it is now.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Everything You Need to Know About Arctic Sea Ice Melt, in One 10-Second Animated Gif