The heat disintegrates Canada's last intact ice shelf
Environment — di Simone Santi
In Canada, the Milne Ice Shelf, intact for four thousand years, has collapsed due to temperatures 5 degrees above average.
The heat disintegrates Canada's last intact ice shelf
In Canada, the Milne Ice Shelf, intact for four thousand years, has collapsed due to temperatures 5 degrees above average.
The Milne Ice Shelf, on the north-western coast of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, has disintegrated, splitting into two large pieces and sending large blocks of ice drifting into the Arctic Ocean.
A first fracture of this enormous four-thousand-year-old ice shelf had already occurred between 30 and 31 July, when the 187-square-kilometre slab broke into two parts — one of 106 square kilometres and another of 81 square metres. Now the latter has broken further into two pieces (55 square kilometres and 24 square kilometres), along with numerous smaller icebergs.
Research by Carleton University
Field instruments belonging to Carleton University were still on the Milne Ice Shelf and have been lost. Derek Muller, a professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, has visited the ice shelf eleven times since 2004 and was due to be there during this period, before his mission was cancelled due to the pandemic. "The goal of the research," explained Luke Copland, professor of Glaciology and researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Ottawa, "is to learn more about how ice shelves destabilise and break apart in a warmer climate." It is precisely the rise in temperatures that is, of course, behind the shelf's break-up: so far, the summer in the Canadian Arctic has recorded an average of five degrees above that of the past thirty years.
Canada’s last fully intact Arctic ice shelf has collapsed.
The Milne Ice Shelf lost some 40 percent of its area — and the last known epishelf lake in the northern hemisphere — over two days late last month arctictoday.com/canadas-last-f…
The Milne Ice Shelf lost some 40 percent of its area — and the last known epishelf lake in the northern hemisphere — over two days late last month arctictoday.com/canadas-last-f…
The Milne Ice Shelf was the last of Canada's ice shelves to break up, Carleton University notes: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Canadian Arctic had a single ice shelf of 8,600 square kilometres stretching along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island. By 2000, the mass had divided into six large ice shelves and several smaller ones covering a total area of 1,050 square kilometres.
Ellesmere Island witnessed major ice shelf break-up events in 2003, 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2012. The Milne Ice Shelf had been considered one of the least vulnerable to break-up, as it is well protected within Milne Fjord, but it has suffered many fractures in recent years.