This was reported by the Climate Change Monitoring service of the European Copernicus program. According to the service, in March 2025, the area of Arctic ice amounted to 14.5 million square kilometers, which is 6% less than the average for this month in 1991-2020.

According to the Financial Times (FT), this situation creates opportunities for a "geopolitical race" between different states. It is expected that a significant part of the Arctic region will be ice-free in about ten years. Rebecca Pinkus, former director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Institute for Polar Research, told the newspaper that the activity of military and merchant vessels, especially Russian ones, has sharply increased in the region.

"The navigation season, when ships can pass there, is increasing," she said. The areas of the Okhotsk and Barents Seas are being particularly significantly ice-free. In addition, according to Samantha Burgess, deputy head of Copernicus, the Canadian Arctic, as well as the western and eastern coasts of Greenland, experienced "significantly higher than average" temperatures in March. kommersant.ru.