Arctic Sea Ice Extent minimum was in mid-September, and there is still less ice on the water than there has been in early November since at least 1979. (Probably longer than that, we just don’t have any satellite data from before that year.
After the record low SIE in 2012, the ice made a rather quick recovery. The “recovery” this year seems to be delayed….As of today, by about a million square kilometers.
https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iqr_timeseries.png
It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong.