A Pair of Canadian Ice Caps Has Disappeared Completely

[flash13]

A Pair of Canadian Ice Caps Has Disappeared Completely

On the left, you can see what were the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in August 2015. On the right, you can see they’re gone as of July 2020. Image: Bruce Raup

 

(National Snow and Ice Data Center)

 

A set of polar ice caps has literally disappeared. We don’t need any more evidence that the Earth is warming to the point of mass instability, but this

 

latest discovery is unsettling, to say the least.

 

Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said last week that the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in the northeastern Ellesmere Island in

 

Nunavut, Canada, are nowhere to be seen on satellite imagery. Researchers long suspected that this would be possible, but the prediction has come a

 

bit sooner than expected.

 

An ice cap is a sort of mini-glacier. These formations stretch less than 19,300 square miles, so they’re smaller than ice sheets. The St. Patrick Bay ice

 

caps were truly tiny: In 1959, the largest one was merely 2.9 square miles, and the smaller one was only 1.1 square miles. By 2001, the two ice caps had

 

shrunk to 62% and 58% of their 1959 size, respectively.

 

In 2017, a team published a paper suggesting that the ice caps would be gone in the next five years due to rapidly warming temperatures in the Arctic.

 

Well, seems it was more like three years. The ice caps are missing in satellite photos from July 14, 2020. This year has been especially brutal throughout

 

the region. Recent months have been plagued by heatwaves and wildfires across the Arctic. This extreme heat likely contributed to the melting of the

 

ice caps. Research has found that summers in the region haven’t bee this warm in 115,000 years.

 

Still, these two ice caps, along with all those scattered along the waters that feed into the Baffin Bay, have been suffering for quite some time. The

 

Barnes ice cap, for instance, holds some of the world’s most ancient ice, yet satellite imagery shows how quickly it’s been retreating over the last

 

decade. Meanwhile, the St. Patrick Bay ice caps formed only a few centuries ago. Since at least 1959, they’ve been dramatically retreating. Now, they’re

 

gone.

 

Up close and personal. You can see them there in 2015 and now gone in 2020. Image: Bruce Raup (National Snow and Ice Data Center)

 

“We’ve long known that as climate change takes hold, the effects would be especially pronounced in the Arctic,” said Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, in

 

a press release. “But the death of those two little caps that I once knew so well has made climate change very personal. All that’s left are some

 

photographs and a lot of memories.”

 

He first visited these ice caps in 1982 as a graduate student. He’s been studying and watching them ever since. Back then, global warming wasn’t the

 

urgent crisis it’s become. Events such as this show just how damaging its impacts can be. They remind us that the climate crisis is here; it’s arrived. With

 

every ice cap or ice sheet that melts, our oceans rise just a little bit more. Some may not care for the Arctic lands up north, but they should care about

 

their beaches and cities that’ll wind up underwater if we continue on this path.

 

 

Source