The ‘Last Ice Area’ is a narrow strip of ice covering about a million square miles along the north coast of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, which has long endured the effects of climate change.
A team at the University of Toronto found that the ice arcs holding the frozen water together could quickly collapse as a result of the melting, driving large chunks of ice south in warmer regions.
Using satellite images, researchers observed warming trends showing that the ice arcs are shifting and losing mass at twice as fast as the entire Arctic.
The loss of the last ice area can disrupt the entire ecosystem, including ice algae, brine channels and photogenic species such as polar bears.
Professor Kent Moore, who was involved in the study, said, “This very old ice is what we are concerned about.”
The hope is that this area will last until the middle of this century or even longer. And then, hopefully, we can eventually cool the planet. ‘
‘The ice will start to grow again, and then this area can serve as a kind of seed.’
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A team from the University of Toronto found that the ice arcs that hold the Last Ice Area together could quickly collapse as a result of the melting, resulting in large chunks of ice drifting south in warmer regions.
The ice arches typically develop at the northern and southern ends of Nares Strait and play an important role in keeping the ‘Last Ice Area’ in place.
“The Arctic Ocean is evolving into an ice pack that is younger, thinner and more mobile, and the fate of its perennial ice is becoming more and more interesting,” reads the study published in Nature Communications.
The team used sea ice motion retrievals captured by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite, allowing them to record the behavior of the ice arcs and changes in the amount of ice.
They used data from ice arches along the Nares Strait, which is 24 miles wide and 602 miles long.
Using satellite images, researchers observed warming trends showing that the ice arcs are shifting and losing mass at twice as fast as the entire Arctic.
This area runs between Greenland and Ellesmere Island from the Arctic Ocean to Baffin Bay.
“The last ice area is losing twice as much ice as the entire Arctic,” Moore said.
“We realized that this area may not be as stable as people think.”
The data shows that the duration of arcing has decreased over the past 20 years and the mass of ice exported through the Strait of Nares has increased.
It’s really deep to imagine a 100-kilometer ice barrier that stands still for months, Moore said.
That’s more than twice the length of Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain Causeway – the world’s longest continuous bridge over water. ‘
“It speaks of the power of ice.”
However, the power is diminishing, Moore warns.
The ice arcs typically develop at the northern and southern ends of Nares Strait and play an important role in keeping the ‘Last Ice Area’ in place
Ice arcs form only part of the year, and when they disintegrate in the spring, ice floats through the Strait of Nares – but this can happen much earlier than previously observed.
“Each year the shortening is about a week,” Moore said.
‘They used to last for about 200 days and now they last for about 150 days. There is quite a significant reduction.
‘We think it has to do with the fact that the ice is simply thinner and thinner ice less stable.’
Part of the Last Ice Are was designated by the Canadian government as the Tuvaijuittuq Marine Protected Area in 2019.
Part of the Last Ice Area was designated by the Canadian government as the Tuvaijuittuq Marine Protected Area in 2019. Tuvaijuittuq is Inuktut for ‘the place where the ice never melts’
Tuvaijuittuq is Inuktut for ‘the place where the ice never melts’.
Last year, it was also revealed that it is melting twice as fast as all the icy cold in the area.
The American Geophysical Union, an accredited earth science organization, shared a video showing that the oldest and thickest solid layer of frozen ocean water has lost 95 percent of its mass in the past 35 years – a “dramatic indicator” of climate change, experts say.
The area is now dominated by thinner and more mobile ice that is more susceptible to melting, which has resulted in ‘stress on the entire spectrum of ice-dependent organisms, from ice algae to polar bears’.
According to WWF-Canada, “even with effective measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the sea ice will shrink and last for shorter periods in winter.”