from the glaciological and arctic sciences institute on lake atlin, british columbia, this is jeffrey barbee reporting for link tv. >> glaciers are not the only things melting. so is arctic sea ice. just how fast is the sea ice melting? research scientist julienne stroeve is working with the national science foundation to find out. >> i know the importance of snow and ice in helping regulate the planet's temperature, it's one of the reasons i went into studying snow and ice because it's very important to our climate system. and i don't think it really was until about 2002, 2003 that we started to really start paying attention to what's happening in the arctic, because before that we would have, you know, we'd have low sea ice in the 1990s and then it would be followed by a high sea ice year, but what started happening in 2000 is you'd have a low sea ice year and another low sea ice year, and it just kept happening and happening year after year. and that was the thing we hadn't seen before, at least during the last sort of 50 years of data collection. and then when 2007 happened, where you ha