The last fully intact ice scale in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed, losing more than 40% of its territory in just two days at the end of July.
The Milne Ice Shelf is located on the edge of the island of Ellesmere, in the sparsely populated northern Canadian territory of Nunavut.
“Above normal air temperature, offshore wind and open water for the ice rink are all part of the recipe for ice rink breaking,” the Canadian Ice Service said in a tweet earlier this week.
“Whole cities are so big. These are large pieces of ice, ”said Luke Copland, a glaciologist at the University of Ottawa who was part of the research team that studied the Milne Ice Shelf.
The area of the plank shrinks by about 80 square km. By comparison, the island of Manhattan in New York covers about 60 square miles.
“This was the largest remaining intact ice shelf, and it’s basically disintegrated,” Copland said.
The Arctic has been warning at twice the global rate over the last 30 years, due to a process known as Arctic amplification. But this year, temperatures in the polar region have been intense. The polar ice cap hit its lowest level for July in 40 years. Record heat and wildfires have burned Siberian Russia.
Summer in the Canadian Arctic has been in particular 5C above the 30-year average this year, Copland said.
This has threatened smaller ice caps, which can melt quickly because they do not have the bulk that larger glaciers need to keep cold. When a glacier disappears, more bedrock is exposed, which then heats up and accelerates the melting process.
“The very small ones, we lose them dramatically,” he said, with the observations of researchers on satellite images. ‘You feel like you’re on a sinking island behind these features, and these are great features. It’s not like it’s a small piece of ice you find in your garden. ‘
The collapse of the ice shelf on Ellesmere Island also meant the loss of the last known epicelf lake of the northern hemisphere, a geographic feature in which a body of fresh water is dammed by the ice board and floats on top of ocean water.
An exploration camp, with instruments for measuring water flow through the ice plank, was lost when the plank collapsed. “It’s fortunate that we were not on the ice when this happened,” said researcher Derek Mueller of Carleton University in Ottawa, in a Aug. 2 blog post.
Ellesmere also lost her two St Patrick Bay ice caps this two summers.
‘We saw them go, like someone with terminal cancer. It was just a matter of time, ”said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.
The disappearance was confirmed last month, when Nasa satellite photos of the region revealed a complete lack of snow and ice, said Serreze, who wore the caps as a graduate student on his first trip to the Arctic years ago. At the time, he said, the caps were similar to immovable parts of the geography.
“When I was there in the 1980s, I knew every square inch of those ice creams,” he said. ‘You have the memories. It’s like your first girlfriend. ‘
Meanwhile, two more ice caps on Ellesmere – named Murray and Simmons – are shrinking and are likely to disappear within 10 years, Serreze said.
