Two Canadian ice caps have completely vanished from the Arctic
On frosty Ellesmere Island, where Arctic Canada butts up against the northwestern edge of Greenland, two once-enormous ice caps have completely vanished, new NASA imagery shows. However, it’s no mystery where the caps, known as the St Patrick Bay ice caps, went. Like many glacial features in the Arctic, which is warming at roughly twice the rate of the rest of the world, the caps were destroyed by climate change. Still, glaciologists who have studied these and other ice formations for decades are unnerved by just how quickly the caps disappeared from our warming planet. The St Patrick Bay ice caps sat about 800 metres above Ellesmere Island’s Hazen Plateau in Nunavut, Canada, where they existed for hundreds of years. Researchers aren’t sure how large the caps were at their maximum extent, but when a team investigated back in 1959 the caps covered about 7.5 square kilometres and three square kilometres respectively. When researchers studied the caps again in 2017, the formations had shrunk to just five per cent of their former sizes. Researchers predicted that the caps would vanish completely within five years. Now here we are, with the caps gone two years ahead of schedule.