File:Sea Ice off Russia (MODIS 2020-01-01).jpg

English: As Moscow struggles with one of the warmest winters on record, a small coastal village in Russia’s Far East describes more than 50 polar bears, unable to hunt on the thin sea ice, gathering close to the town edges—so close that the villagers set up patrols to monitor their movements.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic sea ice extent for November 2019 ended up at the second lowest in the 41-year satellite record, encompassing 9.33 million square kilometers (3.60 million square miles). This was 670,000 square kilometers (259,000 square miles) above the 2016 record low for the month and 1.37 million square kilometers (529,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average.  The report also noted that air temperatures in November, at about 2,500 feet above the surface, were 2 to 4°C (4 to 7°F) above average over the East Siberian, Beaufort, and Chukchi Seas, but near average or only slightly above average over the remainder of the Arctic Ocean. It was also unusually warm, up to 6°C (11°F) above average, over Greenland.

On December 29, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of sea ice forming off the coast of Russia. A light covering of snow lies across both the mainland (west) and Sakhalin Island (east), while ice floats over the Strait of Tartary. Filigrees of sea ice curl over the Sea of Okhotsk. Cloud sweeps across the scene both in the north and in the south.