and we knew that if the planet started to warm and you start melting snow and you ststart melting ice, thn youu're gonna have this sortrt f feedback effecect that's gonnana amplplify the warming because you're gonnana warm up. you'rere gonna melt more snow. you're going to melt more ice. it's going to further warm everything up and melt more and more snow and ice, so you have this really vicious positive feedback. so we e knew that the arctic was very sensitivive to increases in temperature, and it's responding like you would expect it toto as the temperatures have warmed, so it is sort of an early-warning system. we did expect changes to happen first there before everywhere else in the planet. if you looked at the factors that we tended to use to explain past low sea ice years, and those factors really weren't working anymore, so it wasn't necessarily a certain weather pattern or, you know, a certain temperature pattern that was causing it. there's some sort of background force that was happening on the ice cover that we, you know, were trying to figure out what that was. when i star