Most mornings since the end of March, before Will Hobbs has done much at all other than make a coffee, he scrolls his inbox looking for one particular email.
Generated and sent automatically from a colleague, the email arrives just after 4am and gives the latest data from a US government satellite showing how much sea ice is floating around Antarctica.
“Unprecedented is a word that gets bandied around a lot, but it doesn’t really get to just how shocking this is,” said Hobbs, a sea ice scientist at the University of Tasmania. “It is very much outside our understanding of this system.”
In February, the floating sea ice around Antarctica hit a record low
