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 wenent 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 colollection. and then when 2007 happened, where you had 26% drop from the previous september in 2006, and everybody was like, what is going on? 'cause nobody expected that large of a drop. it took everybody by surprise in the science community. ththe rate of decline right t nw ov