This year we've gotten a head start on the Arctic sea ice melt season. Instead of releasing a two month animation after the fact we've created an animation of Arctic sea ice concentration for the last 60 days which will be updated daily. The idea is folks can watch the arctic melt as it's happening this summer.

The kml is still beta in that some of the screen overlays need work and the popup text could stand some editing. But the animation is functioning fine and we can already see some areas losing ice cover sooner than normal. As the cosmetics get fixed we'll include those in the daily updates which the top level kml calls via a network link.

The beta version is currently the top entry on our "Technical Experiments" page at:
http://nsidc.org/data/virtual_globes/beta.html