Researchers were happy to announce Arctic sea ice had made a dramatic recovery as of this August.
Scientists looked at data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) CryoSat satellite, and found sea ice coverage was up 50 percent compared to the year before, an ESA news release reported.
In October of 2013, Arctic ice coverage measured at 9,000 cubic kilometers (about 2,159 cubic miles), this is a drastic improvement since the 6,000 cubic kilometer (around 1,439 cubic mile) measurement taken during the prior October.
Data from the past few years has reported a disappointing decline in Arctic sea ice; however researchers are open to the idea that the information could contain errors due to the rapid movement of sea ice.
CryoSat is believed to more-accurately determine sea ice thickness and coverage across the entire Atlantic Ocean.
CryoSat data determined about 90 percent of the growth can be found in multi-year ice (which lasts for at least two summers without melting); the other 10 percent was observed in shorter-lived ice.
The team believes 2013's multiyear ice was 20 percent (about 11 inches) thicker than it was in 2012.
"One of the things we'd noticed in our data was that the volume of ice year-to-year was not varying anything like as much as the ice extent - at least in 2010, 2011 and 2012," study leader Rachel Tilling of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said in the news release. "We didn't expect the greater ice extent left at the end of this summer's melt to be reflected in the volume. But it has been, and the reason is related to the amount of multiyear ice in the Arctic."
The researchers stressed this fortunate rise in sea-ice thickness does not indicate a longer trend of improvement.
"It's estimated that there was around [20,000] cubic kilometres of Arctic sea ice each October in the early 1980s, and so today's minimum still ranks among the lowest of the past 30 years," Professor Andrew Shepherd from University College London, a co-author of the study, said.
