Last season in the Arctic was the warmest in 125 years. Sea ice extent, during its usual March maximum, was the lowest in 47 years of satellite recording. The North American tundra was greener and more plant-rich than ever.
These observations, shared Tuesday in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual Arctic report, show how rapidly and profoundly the region is changing as the planet warms.
“The Arctic continues to warm faster than the global average, with the past ten years constituting the ten warmest years on record,” said Steve Thur, NOAA’s acting chief scientist and deputy administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research.
Because of this warming, “melting permafrost is altering ecosystems, turning more than 200 watersheds in Arctic Alaska orange as iron and other elements are released into its rivers,” Thur said. Researchers observed higher acidity and a greater concentration of toxic metals in these rusty streams.
This is one of several consequences of climate change in the region highlighted by the report. This is the 20th year NOAA has released its Arctic report, but the first during President Donald Trump’s second term.
The Trump administration has taken steps to scuttle or downplay other climate change reporting, including the National Climate Assessment and a climate disaster database costing billions of dollars. Trump has also called climate change a “fraud” and his administration is working to remove the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate the greenhouse gas pollution that causes it.
At a news conference Tuesday, Matthew Druckenmiller, one of the report’s authors and a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said the team “received no political interference with our results.”
Outside scientists interviewed by NBC News said the report had much of the same tone and message of concern as in previous years, with some minor exceptions.
“I honestly didn’t see much of a change in tone from previous Arctic report cards in years past, which was great to see,” said Tom Di Liberto, climate scientist and media director at Climate Central. “The implications of their findings are the same as those of previous Arctic report cards. The Arctic is the canary in the coal mine.”
Di Liberto previously worked in NOAA’s communications office, but was laid off in March, when the agency laid off employees who were new to their roles. He pointed out that the title of last year’s report called for a reduction in fossil fuel production, while the new report did not mention fossil fuels at all. Otherwise, he hasn’t noticed any major changes.
NOAA unveiled the report, which describes how climate change is disrupting ecosystems and threatening livelihoods in the Arctic region, at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in New Orleans. This event, one of the largest scientific conferences of the year, brings together thousands of scientists.
Marc Alessi, a climate scientist and member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the newsletter “does a great job of reporting the facts about what is literally happening on the ground in the Arctic.”
“Anyone reading this can see that he continues to sound the red alarm,” he added.
The report’s authors point out – in somewhat dry language – how proposed budget cuts to the network of scientific programs that make measurements in the Arctic, such as satellite programs measuring sea ice, could endanger the data collection that powers the report and the decisions made based on it.
“Funding and personnel risks, as well as aging infrastructure, could worsen the existing AON. [Arctic Observing Network] gaps, compromising long-term trend analyzes and compromising decision-making,” the report said.
It notably highlights several satellites that are part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and which are scheduled to be decommissioned in 2026. Their loss will limit sea ice measurements, according to the report. It also notes that a data set on tundra greenness will not be updated due to NASA funding cuts and that other climate data sets could be affected by proposed federal budget cuts for fiscal year 2026.
The Arctic is warming two to four times faster than other parts of Earth due to a dynamic called Arctic amplification, which changes both ocean currents and the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth’s surface near the pole.
“It’s this feedback where you lose sea ice, land ice, you start absorbing more sunlight and you start warming much faster,” Alessi said.
Temperature records are organized by Arctic water year, with the most recent spanning October 2024 to September 2025.
