Two massive ice caps in Arctic Canada have completely disappeared, according to new NASA imagery. The caps were killed by climate change.
Known as the St. Patrick Bay, the vanished ice caps were already warming at roughly twice the rate of the rest of the world. Though an unexpected result of climate change, glaciologists were still unnerved how rapidly the caps melted.
Mark Serreze, director of National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), said that he was blown away by how fast the ice caps near St. Patrick Bay on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada melted away. "When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape," he said in a statement. "To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away."
Ice caps are glaciers that encompass less than 50,000 square kilometers of land on Earth. This unique geological feature is found in high altitudes, mostly in the polar region, and covers everything underneath them in ice. According to NSIDC, ice caps melting off contribute to the rise of sea level, as well as decrease the amount of reflective white surfaces on our planet.
The St. Patrick Bay ice caps have existed for hundreds of years in Canada, though scientists can specify how massive the caps were at the max extent. In a 1959 scientific investigation, the caps covered approximately 7.5 square km and the smaller one at 3 square km.
In 2017, a research team discovered that the ice caps had begun to shrink to just 5% of their previous sizes. That's when Serreze made the prediction, which was published in the journal The Cryosphere, that the caps would completely disappear within five years.
Well, he was wrong. Apparently, we're ahead of schedule.
NASA's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) imaged the island on July 14, which revealed the barren peaks of the Hazen Plateau. In Greenland, which is not far off the island, there's been an increase in ice loss by sixfold in the last three decades.
The St. Patrick Bay ice caps were one-half of a group of small ice caps on the Hazen Plateau, believed to have formed several centuries ago during the Little Ice Age. The second half of the Hazen Plateau ice caps, Simmons and Murray, are more elevated, thus faring better. However, they are also predicted to disappear within a decade.
