Arctic sea ice maximum, 5th March 2020, satellite image. The Arctic sea ice (white) reaches a maximum around March, at the end of the Arctic winter. This maximum extent for 2020 covered 15.05 million square kilometres. While this is the largest maximum since 2013, it was still 590,000 square kilometres below the 1981-2010 average and continues the downward trend seen in sea ice extent over recent years. The Arctic sea ice maximum extent has dropped by an average of 2.8 percent per decade since 1979. The sea ice data for this image is from the AMSR2 (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2) sensor on the Japanese Shizuku satellite.