Electricity → CO₂ → Arctic sea ice

How much Arctic sea ice does your electricity melt?

Every tonne of CO₂ emitted costs about 3 m² of Arctic summer sea ice. Pick a device, from a light bulb to an AI chatbot prompt or a GPU server, and see how much ice its electricity melts in your country.

– of Arctic sea ice lost

Electricity: –
CO₂ emitted: –
Grid intensity: –

How is this computed?

Electricity = power × duration × quantity (or energy per use × quantity). Equipment that runs in a data centre also gets the building's overhead for cooling and power conversion: we multiply by a PUE of (a 10 kW server makes the data centre draw about 12 kW from the grid).
CO₂ = electricity × carbon intensity of the country's electricity, from Ember (latest available year, data ).
Sea ice = CO₂ × 3 m² per tonne: every tonne of CO₂ emitted is associated with the loss of about 3 m² of September Arctic sea ice (Notz & Stroeve, 2016, Science).

Where do the AI numbers come from?

Chatbot prompt, 0.3 Wh: Epoch AI (2025) estimate for a typical ChatGPT (GPT-4o) query. It is in line with the figures published since: Google reports a median of 0.24 Wh for a Gemini text prompt and OpenAI an average of 0.34 Wh for ChatGPT. Reasoning models, images and video can use far more.
Long-document prompt, 2.5 Wh: Epoch AI's estimate for a query with ~10,000 input tokens.
GPU systems: maximum power from NVIDIA's documentation: DGX H100 10.2 kW, DGX B200 14.3 kW; a GB200 NVL72 rack draws about 120 kW. Real average use is usually somewhat lower.

Caveats

Household values are typical ratings. We use the average carbon intensity of each country's grid; a green electricity contract or on-site solar is not taken into account. The sea-ice relation is an observed long-term average, so read the result as an order of magnitude.