(Image Source: The9Billion)

BY LOGAN TITTLE

You're watching multisource world news analysis from Newsy.

Things are heating up in the arctic. New studies have found sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is falling closer to record lows.

The Christian Science Monitor has more.

“Coming so close to the end of the melt season, the observation holds out the prospect that 2011 could replace 2007 as the toughest year for sea-ice survival…Recent work by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder suggests that roughly half the decline can be attributed to the effects of global warming.”

NTDTV reports-- satellites have been used to collect data on the sea ice—but can only scratch the surface. Another team of researchers set out to find how thin the ice really is.

TILL WAGNER, CAMBRIDGE: "What the radar of the satellite sees is just the part of the ice that is really above the water and since about nine tenths of the ice is underneath the water there is a huge error margin.
REPORTER: "Researchers say that the ice area in late summer is now shrinking by almost 10 percent per decade, while it has thinned by nearly half in winter since 1980.”

To get a better picture of what this means - artist John Quigleycreated a version of Da’ Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” 800 kilometers from the North Pole. It’s the size of 4 Olympic swimming pools—and purposefully missing a few limbs.

The artist told Germany’s Deutsche Welle...

“We came here to create the ‘Melting Vitruvian Man’… because climate change is literally eating into the body of our civilization... The poles are the regions most sensitive to climate change on Earth, and the Artcic sea ice melt is one of the most visible impacts of climate instability.”

The ice is getting thinner, but not everyone is biting their nails at the news—The Independent says the frozen field is a potential packer of oil.

“In July 2008, the US Geological Survey released the first ever publicly available estimate of the oil locked in the earth north of the Arctic Circle… It was 90 billion barrels…Less than a year later…they said the Arctic might in fact hold as much as 160 billion barrels, which would amount to more than 35 years of US oil imports”

In Depth News reports-- the melt down will bring up new sea routes to the east coast of Asia and west coast of North America. Two weeks are left in the summer melting season for the Arctic sea.

'Like' Newsy on Facebook for updates in your news feed.

Get more multisource video news analysis from Newsy.

Transcript by Newsy.