A report published in the journal Nature Communications projects an ice-free Arctic in the month of September under all IPCC scenarios. This can happen as early as the 30’s.
The report states that the ‘dominant influence of greenhouse gas increases on the Arctic’ is on average underestimated by previous models. Most earlier studies analyzed ‘sea ice extent’. This means that the Arctic area is divided in grid cells. The total area of all grid cells with at least 15% of sea ice concentration is consequently defined as ‘see ice extent’. In contrast, this new study analyzed the actual area covered, which is a much more granular approach. They used satellite data from 1979 to 2019.
It is a scientific report and therefore sometimes hard to read. For scientists the link to the actual report can be found here. For non-scientist: both CNN and The Guardian wrote an easy-to-read article about this alarming new report.