It’s not going to come as a surprise to anyone paying attention that the amount of arctic sea ice is decreasing, but reading about it is not always as compelling as seeing relevant visualizations. Below are a couple time lapse videos showing arctic ice extent and ice age from 1990 through 2016.
They are both narrated and based on the same data.
The gist of it is that the maximum age of arctic ice – and maximum thickness, as older ice tends to be thicker – has declined dramatically in the last thirty years. A big factor in this has been the warming of the Beaufort Sea, which contains the Beaufort Gyre, a nursery for old sea ice.