This large ice sheet then drifted into the Arctic Sea, breaking further into two large pieces. This whole calf event – the scientific term for breaking ice cubes of glaciers – was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel satellite.
The piece that broke off was about 80 square kilometers – larger than the 60 square kilometers of Manhattan.
“Above normal air temperature, offshore wind and open water for the ice rink are all part of the recipe for ice rink breaking,” according to the Canadian Ice Service.
“Due to the presence of pre-existing fractures in the remaining Milne Ice Shelf, there is a potential for further destabilization,” the Water and Ice Research Laboratory (WIRL) said in a press release on August 7. The ice shelf is not yet unstable and further ice breaks are possible in the coming days and weeks, warned WIRL.
A research site on the ice rink was destroyed in this column.
“Luckily we were not on the ice when this happened, our camp area and instruments were all destroyed in this incident,” said Derek Mueller, professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Research at Carleton University in in a blog post on August 2nd.
Mueller and his team have visited Milne Ice Shelf several times, but the trip was canceled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The last known epishelfsee in the Arctic could be away due to the ice shelf break. An epic lake is a body of fresh water, trapped by an iceberg floating on top of ocean water.
When the Milne Ice Shelf collapsed, it potentially sent once contained fresh water into the salt water of the Arctic Ocean. Investigators are unsure of the extent of this damage “because it depends on the integrity of the remaining part of the Milne Ice Self.”
Ice boards like these can help limit sea level rise by acting as a dam, slowing down the flow of melting ice and water in the oceans. These large calf events can also pose dangers to shipping by creating essentially large icebergs floating across the northern oceans.
The Arctic continues to heat up much faster than any other region in the world, as Arctic heat waves continuously affect the region. Temperatures across the Arctic continued to rise across Canada and Siberia in July this year, with large wildfires continuing to burn.
“Globally, it was the third warmest July in this data record, behind 2016 and 2019,” Copernicus told ECMWF in its monthly climate bulletin.
This is not the first time this year that the Canadian Arctic has lost significant ice functions.
Earlier this summer, two of the St. Patrick’s Bay icebergs in Canada disappeared completely. The two ice caps were located on the same Ellesmere Island as the Milne Ice Shelf in Nunavut.
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