evidence: They're at a record level." — ITV interview. [...] While a small number of experts a decade ago had predicted that Arctic would be free of summer sea ice by now, most mainstream scientists and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not; instead they said Arctic sea ice would shrink, which it has, said Pennsylvania State University ice scientist Richard Alley. Most scientists, including the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, are predicting that the Arctic will be free of summer sea ice sometime around the 2040s. The Arctic set a record for the lowest amount of sea ice in the winter, when sea ice usually grows to its maximum levels, in March 2017. In 2012, the Arctic set a record for lowest sea ice levels. Sea ice recovered slightly from that record and in 2017 in September, the annual low was only the eighth lowest on record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. But the 10 lowest years of sea ice have been all in the last 11 years. Arctic sea ice is declining at a rate of 13.2 percent per decade, according to NASA.