"The biggest problem in the past with aerial imagery in agriculture is that everything is time-sensitive, and with unmanned aerial vehicles we'd be able to process that data much more quickly, " said Steve Cubbage, president of Prime Meridian, a company that sells precision agriculture data services to growers.

WSJ: Farmers Experiment With Drones

Yet when scientists studied observable data for the same period, including shipping logs, aerial photos and satellite images, they discovered the actual figure for ice loss from 1953 until 2006 to be 7.8 percent.

CNN: Arctic melt worse than predictions