If you stumbled across an alarming chart about sea ice on Twitter last month and doomsday scenarios immediately leaped into your head, youre not alone.

What the graph illustrates is true: Theres substantially less sea ice in the world than ever before. The Arctic and, for completely unrelated reasons, the Antarctic just closed out November with less ice than any other year in history.

But the real cause for alarm isnt last months warming blip in the Arctic that temporarily stalled ice growth, an anomaly that happens from time to time. Nor is it the concurrent loss of ice in the Antarctic since, to the best of our knowledge, the behavior of sea ice in one hemisphere has nothing to do with the behavior of sea ice in the other.

The scariest part of all this is the long-term warming trend it follows.

The 10 lowest years [of Arctic sea ice] have all occurred in the last 10 years, said Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Heres why that matters, in the context of Novembers stall in Arctic sea ice growth.

Typically, after a warm summer , the Arctic will cool down as it plunges into the darkness of winter. Sea ice will regrow, reflecting sunlight and shielding the waters below from further warming.

In mid-November of this year, unseasonably warm temperatures upward of 30 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal occurred in the Arctic, chasing away the cooler air that normally settles in the region: