⁍ Scientists on Monday said the vast and ancient ice sheet sitting atop Greenland had sloughed off a 113 square kilometer chunk of ice last month.

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⁍ With climate change driving up Arctic temperatures, the once-solid sea ice cover has been shrinking to stark, new lows in recent years.

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⁍ This year’s minimum, still a few days from being declared, is expected to be the second-lowest expanse in four decades of record-keeping.

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– A chunk of Greenland’s Spalte Glacier broke free of its ice sheet last month, giving the Arctic its second-lowest minimum of sea ice in four decades, the Guardian reports. “Not so long ago, I heard that we had 100 years before the Arctic would be ice free in the summer,” Reuters quotes ice pilot Paul Ruzycki as saying. “Then I heard 75 years, 25 years, and just recently I heard 15 years. It’s accelerating.” According to a study published Monday in Nature Climate Change, the amount of sea ice in the Arctic is now 31% lower than it was in the decade after 1979—and much of the thicker ice layer has long since melted away. Sea ice coverage minimums are also about 31% lower than they were in the decade after 1979. “The new climate can’t be predicted by the previous climate,” Laura Landrum, one of the study’s authors, says. “The year-to-year variability, the change in many of these parameters, is moving outside the bounds of past fluctuations.” This year’s minimum of 3.41 million square kilometers is not much below the record low of 3.41 million square kilometers reached in September 2012. And as climate change continues, scientists say the sea ice is unlikely to recover to past levels. In fact, the long-frozen region is already shifting to an entirely new climate regime, marked by the escalating trends in ice melt, temperature rise, and rainfall days.