For the past month, Siberia has captured the world’s attention thanks to a climate change-fueled heat wave that caused temperatures in an Arctic town to crack 100 degrees in June and whipped up an outbreak of fires across normally frigid tundra. But an equally alarming situation is unfolding just north of Siberia’s shores: sea ice is crashing in a region that scientists consider to be the ice factory of the Arctic.

In fact, there’s so little ice cover in the Laptev Sea north of Siberia—as well as the Barents Sea to the west—that ice cover across the entire Arctic Ocean is currently at its lowest mid-July extent on record. If sea ice continues…