image caption By 31 July, the Milne Ice Shelf's northern front had fractured The Planet Earth-observation company has just released new imagery of the broken Milne Ice Shelf in the Arctic. In August, Adrienne White – an ice analyst at the Canadian Ice Service who monitors the Canadian Arctic for changes in sea ice – was reviewing satellite imagery when she spotted something remarkable. While other… Eye on the Arctic – Understanding the Milne ice shelf … From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Milne Ice Shelf, a fragment of the former Ellesmere Ice Shelf, is located in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. The Milne Ice Shelf was 4,000 years old before it broke into several pieces and collapsed into the sea. They had observed rifts appearing over the Milne ice shelf throughout their careers. The remote area in the northern reach of the Nunavut Territory, has seen ice cover shrink from over 4 metres thick in the 1950s to complete loss, according to scientists, during recent years of record warming. The Milne Ice Shelf from the western side of Milne Fjord. There’s so many measures that we can’t make unless we’re in the field; for example, we can’t really measure how thick the ice is from space. The Ellesmere Ice Shelf was the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, encompassing about 9,100 square kilometres (3,500 square miles) of the north coast of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada. White: Absolutely not. It’s not an easy thing to get used to. Copland: If you look at the changes [over time], we’ve lost more than 90% of ice shelves in the last hundred years. It is the second largest ice shelf in the Arctic Ocean. Eighty sq km broke free from Milne, leaving a still secure segment just 106 sq km in size. It was a question of when. This recent ice exhibits an undulating topog- raphy where the ridges separate troughs filled with meltwater. Derek Mueller: Shock and sadness, in some ways. The Milne Ice Shelf was considered one of the least vulnerable to breaking because of the protection offered it by Milne Fjord. Warwick Vincent, a biology professor at Laval University who has worked in the Arctic for more than two decades, say such dramatic changes point to the need for greater protection for parts of the Arctic that will be the last to hold on to sea ice as the world warms. The entire icescape has changed. Milne Ice Shelf was the last remnant of these once-great structures. The Milne Ice Shelf in Canada lost nearly half of its area in just two days. Mueller had been studying a channel that ran below the surface of the Milne ice shelf, like a river. Between July 30 and August 4, the Milne Ice Shelf collapsed into the Arctic Ocean. Mueller: All of the other ice shelves had broken up in past years, so it wasn’t a question of if for this particular ice shelf. So, these are ecosystems that are lost basically for good now," Hamilton said. How did you first learn of the calving event? The Milne Ice Shelf, a fragment of the former Ellesmere Ice Shelf, is located in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. We’d seen increased melting on the surface and the bottom [of the Milne], as well as long-term thinning. A huge chunk larger than Manhattan, roughly 43% of the shelf, broke off in one piece. For Mueller, the breakup of the ice shelf is also potentially a lost opportunity. The day I discovered the Milne ice shelf calving event was a typical day; I came into work and was looking along the coastline of Ellesmere Island [to which the ice shelf was connected] for any changes; over the previous week, I’d noticed there was a lot of open water in the area, which can lead to destabilization. The enormous Milne ice shelf, which was the last intact ice shelf in Canada and which White had studied closely before as a PhD student, was dissolving. In the Arctic, some ice shelves on northern Ellesmere Island receive input from surrounding glaciers (e.g., Milne Ice Shelf), whereas others have built up from the in situ thickening of sea ice and surface snow accumulation with no known glacial input (e.g., Ward Hunt Ice Shelf) (Jeffries, 1992). Situated on the north-west coast of Ellesmere Island, it is located about 270 km (170 mi) west of Alert, Nunavut. But the breakup of these ice shelves is really quite inevitable at this point; along the coast of northern Ellesmere Island, we’re seeing open water and warmer temperatures almost consistently every summer. This was Milne Ice Shelf on the northern margin of Canada's Ellesmere Island. The Milne ice shelf was on of the Arctic’s few remaining intact ice shelves, but at the end of July 2020 about 43% broke off. Is it too late to save Canada’s remaining ice shelves from further breakup? It only shows us how important it is to continue monitoring this coastline and acquiring imagery in this specific area at even higher resolution. Two researchers walking along the Milne Ice Shelf. At the end of July, 40% of the 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf, located on the north-western edge of Ellesmere Island, calved into the sea. [2][3], Glaciers and the morphology and structure of Milne Ice Shelf, Ellesmere Island, N.W.T., Canada, "Canada's last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses", "These Satellite Images Show the Final Days of Canada's Last Ice Shelf", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milne_Ice_Shelf&oldid=973656399, Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut geography stubs, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 18 August 2020, at 13:11. There’s lots of instruments floating around the Arctic that people [had] put out. Ice shelves were already vulnerable to change. Adrienne White: At the Canadian Ice Service, we use satellite imagery to chart sea ice in Canadian waters. We also use this imagery to monitor glaciers and ice shelves for calving events that can produce large ice islands. That being said, it did have large fractures going across it that had been widening over the past few years. Copland believe ice shelves are “a canary in the coalmine” in the climate crisis, given that they are especially susceptible to atmospheric changes. "There aren't very many ice shelves around the Arctic anymore," Copland said. Part of my PhD was looking at what made it so stable, [including] the fact that it was so much thicker and attached to the walls of this fjord. Ice shelves found in the island’s North are formed from sea ice and glacier ice and measure some 100 metres thick. Moving forward, we’re still planning fieldwork, but being very careful and planning around safety. The Milne Ice Shelf acted as a sort of natural dam, trapping the meltwater at the head of the fiord and creating a rare epishelf lake—a layer of fresh water that floats directly on top of the ocean. Mueller: It’s one of those things: We need the data year-round and we can’t stay there year-round, so it’s always a risk. If we can make a change and hit these Paris climate accord targets, there is opportunity. It’s like hearing bad news. And it seems that that crevasse is filled with water, which is ultimately the result of climate change. Looking first at the optical imagery, the same type of imagery you would see on Google Earth, I could see that there was a darker area on the Milne, but there were a lot of clouds on the image that I couldn’t see through. Copland: For ice shelves, we can lose them very quickly; when they break up, that piece of the ice shelf is gone, it floats away. On the other side of the island, the most northerly in Canada, the St Patrick’s Bay ice … [1] It had been the last ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic to be fully intact until July 2020, when over 40 percent of the sheet collapsed within two days, a consequence of global warming. The Milne Ice Shelf is at the edge of Ellesmere Island, in the far northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. The Milne Ice Shelf has now been reduced in area by about 43%. So we knew things were changing. The now-crumbled Milne Ice Shelf - situated in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada - was the last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic, Reuters reported on Thursday. You could put a weather station on a tripod on a glacier and it could fall over. Did you ever think you’d lose your equipment to an event like this? But to form an ice shelf, it takes hundreds to thousands of years, because you need a gradual buildup of snow and ice. In Milne Fiord and Ayles Fiord the ice island calving and ice shelf movement respectively created large areas that have become filled with new ice (Area A, Figs. All rights reserved. White: This is really an area that has changed from [once] being completely ice-covered. Still, it was a shock to see the thickest, strongest part of the ice shelf break apart in this one big piece. We think of these as semi-permanent features. Situated on the north-west coast of Ellesmere Island, it … Canada’s last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses The shelf’s area shrank by about 80 square kilometers. Luke Copland: I got a text from Adrienne – I remember it clearly – and it just said: “The Milne ice shelf is gone.” I saw it and thought, ‘Crap, is that real?’ We’d both spent a lot of time working and living on the ice shelf, flying around it, studying it, so I texted her back and she described the process and the timing. 4B and 5B). The Milne ice shelf was on of the Arctic’s few remaining intact ice shelves, but at the end of July 2020 about 43% broke off. In August, Adrienne White – an ice analyst at the Canadian Ice Service who monitors the Canadian Arctic for changes in sea ice – was reviewing satellite imagery when she spotted something remarkable. It is the second largest ice shelf in the Arctic Ocean. Ellesmere Island’ s ice shelves were subject to significant ruptures and calving events in 2003, 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2012. A FULLY intact ice shelf in Canada has collapsed as the block of ice bigger than Manhattan snapped off. Animals have been found living beneath ice shelves before, but never – to Mueller and his colleagues’ knowledge – inside of one. The Milne Shelf is located within the Tuvaijuittuq marine protected area, which, perhaps ironically, translates to "the place where the ice never melts" in Inuktitut. That takes a day. There’s also been a shift over the last few years to studying [the Arctic] by helicopter. A south view of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf breaking apart is seen from Ward Hunt Island, Nunavut, in an Aug. 20, 2011, handout photo. Does this change your plans to study the area? The ice shelf, researchers say, lost more than … It was Canada's last intact Arctic ice shelf. Still, the breakup – known as a calving event – is significant. White: I was really surprised. The ice shelf was first documented by the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76, in which Lieutenant Pelham Aldrich's party went from Cape Sheridan to Cape Alert. We spoke to them about what that day was like, and where they go from here. The Milne Ice Shelf is seen before its collapse last summer. Mueller: I always have to say yes, it’s too late. Mueller: The ice shelf is still half there. Now, every year, we’ve seen open water along the entire coast of Ellesmere Island. In 1986, the ice shelf had an area of about 290 km2 (110 sq mi), with a central thickness of 100 m (330 ft). Together and separately, the three have been studying the Arctic for years. Researchers studying the area in the Arctic for years describe the day of the calving event – and where they go from here, Wed 14 Oct 2020 08.00 BST But the action we take now will prevent this – or mitigate it, anyway – in the future, in other places. An aerial view shows the breakup of the Milne Ice Shelf in late July 2020 (left) and animals found living in its ice cavity (right) at the site boxed in red . (Luke Copland/Courtesy Carleton University) Still, this ice shelf is huge, it’s bigger than large cities are, and it’s very strange to look at a satellite image one day and then look at [the same area] the next day, and the thing doesn’t exist any more. 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