Global sea ice records broken (yet again)

This is starting to become an annual tradition, here on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog. Just like last year and the year before that, the record for lowest global sea ice minimum has been broken. The lowest global sea ice extent minimum on record (NSIDC and JAXA) was reached two weeks ago. I wanted to wait a bit and see whether the record for NSIDC global sea ice area would be broken too, but it wasn't, although the minimum came in at a solid second place, practically on a par with last year.

Here's the graph, as provided by Wipneus:

And here you see the anomaly of all those trend lines in chronological order, having hovered between 2 and 4 σ (standard deviations) since the 2016 crash:

Not enough Antarctic sea ice melted to clinch the lowest Antarctic sea ice minimum record (coming in second lowest 'only'), and so the decisive nudge was given by the sea ice in the Arctic, refusing to freeze along some of the edges, most notably in the Bering Sea. Here's how the graph for that region looks as of today, with some of the open water even spilling into the adjacent Chukchi Sea, which is highly unusual for this time of year: