What's worse, it appears to be speeding up, said physicist Josefino Comiso, the senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and author of the study published last month in Geophysical Research Letters.

Comiso studied the perennial ice cap -- the ice that survives throughout the summer -- from satellite data collected between 1978 to 2000 and concluded that the ice cap was disappearing at an alarming rate.

"I found out this ice cover is actually decreasing at about nine per cent per decade," Comiso said.

"More solar heat is coming through, so it melts more ice in the summer. The ice doesn't have much chance to recover in the winter."

Infrared satellite images that measure the ice surface temperature indicate that it too is also rising.

"The surface temperature has been increasing at the rate of 1.2 degrees Centigrade per decade," he said.

Comiso said with higher atmospheric temperatures and warmer sea water, the ice is definitely disappearing and that may be an indication of the greenhouse effect.

"It's made up of very thick ice that will not melt during the summer, but because it's melting at that very high rate, that means that something is going on and it might be related to global warming," he said.

Should the melt continue as it has the past 22 years, he said the polar ice will be gone before the end of the century.

"The implications of such a disappearance of the perennial ice cover are many and can be profound," he said.

In 30 years of monitoring the polar ice, NASA has never observed as much open water as they have over the past summer.

"In 2002, we have a lot more open water -- more than we've ever had at the end of the summer," he said.

The data collected is only a snapshot in time and Comiso said the study does not confirm anything for certain.

"There is a possibility that it could bounce back," he said. "We have to work with what we have and that is 20 to 30 years of data."