Canada's last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses

It lost over 40% of its city-size area in just two days at the end of last month, say researchers

Eureka Sound on Ellesmere Island as seen in a Nasa Operation IceBridge survey picture taken on March 25, 2014. The Milne Ice Shelf, at the fringe of Ellesmere Island, has collapsed. "Above-normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in fro
Eureka Sound on Ellesmere Island as seen in a Nasa Operation IceBridge survey picture taken on March 25, 2014. The Milne Ice Shelf, at the fringe of Ellesmere Island, has collapsed. "Above-normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for ice shelf break-up," the Canadian Ice Service said. PHOTO: REUTERS

OTTAWA • The last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed, losing over 40 per cent of its area in just two days at the end of last month, researchers said.

The Milne Ice Shelf is at the fringe of Ellesmere Island, in the sparsely populated northern Canadian territory of Nunavut.

"Above-normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for ice shelf break-up," the Canadian Ice Service said on Twitter when it announced the loss last Sunday.

"Entire cities are that size. These are big pieces of ice," said Professor Luke Copland, a glaciologist at the University of Ottawa who was part of the research team studying the Milne Ice Shelf.

The shelf's area shrank by about 80 square km. By comparison, the island of Manhattan in New York covers roughly 60 sq km.

"This was the largest remaining intact ice shelf, and it's disintegrated, basically," Dr Copland said.

The Arctic has been warming at twice the global rate for 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 sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years. Record heat and wildfires have scorched Siberian Russia. Summer in the Canadian Arctic this year in particular has been 5 deg Celsius above the 30-year average, Dr Copland said.

That has threatened smaller ice caps, which can melt quickly because they do not have the bulk that larger glaciers have to stay cold. As a glacier disappears, more bedrock is exposed, which then heats up and accelerates the melting process.

"The very small ones, we're losing them dramatically," he said, citing researchers' reviews of satellite imagery. "You feel like you're on a sinking island chasing these features, and these are large features. It's not as if it's a little tiny patch of ice you find in your garden."

The ice shelf collapse on Ellesmere Island also meant the loss of the northern hemisphere's last known epishelf lake, a geographic feature in which a body of freshwater is dammed by the ice shelf and floats atop ocean water.

A research camp, including instruments for measuring water flow through the ice shelf, was lost when the shelf collapsed.

"It is lucky we were not on the ice shelf when this happened," said researcher Derek Mueller of Carleton University in Ottawa, in an Aug 2 blog post.

Ellesmere Island also lost its two St Patrick Bay ice caps this summer.

"We saw them going, like someone with terminal cancer. It was only a matter of time," said Dr Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

Dr Serreze and other NSIDC scientists had published a 2017 study predicting the ice caps were likely to disappear within five years. The ice caps were believed to have formed several centuries ago.

The Milne Ice Shelf vanishing was confirmed last month, when Nasa satellite shots of the region revealed a complete lack of snow and ice, said Dr Serreze, who studied the caps as a graduate student on his first trip to the Arctic years ago.

At the time, he said, the ice caps had seemed like immovable parts of the geography.

"When I was there in the 1980s I knew every square inch of those ice caps," he said. "You have the memories. It's like your first girlfriend."

Meanwhile, another two ice caps on Ellesmere Island - called Murray and Simmons - are also diminishing and are likely to disappear within 10 years, Dr Serreze said.

REUTERS

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on August 08, 2020, with the headline Canada's last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses. Subscribe