Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, is very pessimistic about the future of the ice caps. In 2017, he already alerted society to the phenomenon of melting ice by predicting that it would disappear “within 5 years”. For CNN, Serreze looked at new satellite images unveiled by NASA that confirm the disappearance of ice caps in Canada. “I can’t say that I was terribly surprised because we knew they were going to disappear, but it happened very quickly”,
The two ice caps concerned were located on the Hazen Plateau in Nunavut, a federal territory of Canada located in the north of the country. The latest data from 1959 indicate that the area of the largest ice cap was nearly 5 km² and the smallest 1.6 km².
According to the report of several scientists, the glaciers probably formed around 5,000 years ago. Their respective maximum size would have been reached between the 16th and the 19th century during a period known as the “small ice age”.
Other alarming predictions
What has harmed these two ice caps would be in part the very hot temperatures experienced during the summer of 2015 in Canada. Rising temperatures have reduced the longevity of the glaciers located in St. Patrick’s Bay. Since that famous summer of 2015, temperatures have never really gone down, as Mark Serreze explains to CNN. “We could really see in 2015 that the 2 caps were hit. But this heat has not really stopped since. It’s just too hot,” he regretted.
The other glaciers that lie near the ice caps of St. Patrick’s Bay are also endangered. Those who are nicknamed Murray and Simmons, and which are found at a higher elevation, also begin to lose area over the years. “I’m going to make another prediction that they’ll be gone in a decade,” said the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Small ice caps located in the Arctic are very sensitive indicators of the effects of climate change, according to Mark Serreze. Indeed, the phenomenon of “the amplification of the Arctic”, which refers to the observation pushes to show that the Arctic is warming at a rate much higher than the rest of the globe, “two to four times more quickly “, according to the specialist.
The heat waves that are hotter than in the past and the cold waves that are not as cold as before are factors that are contributing to the disappearance of all these ice caps.
For Mark Serreze, the disappearance of the ice caps in St. Patrick’s Bay represents only “a tiny part of what is happening in the Arctic now”.
Air, ice and water, a vicious circle
How to explain the melting of the ice? It’s very simple. The air heats up and melts the ice, which uncovers more ocean, which can therefore absorb more of the sun’s rays … which heats the water and melts more ice. The pack ice is thus melting from above and below, and more and more. In the Arctic, sea ice melts in summer and extends in winter. The minimum is observed in September, and the maximum in March, when the ice surface is generally two or three larger than at the end of summer and covers the entire Arctic Ocean.
The ocean is therefore heating up. The atmosphere is heating up in turn, in what is essentially a feedback cycle and a vicious cycle.
Tom Neumann, head of the Glaciological Sciences Laboratory at NASA, told CNN that the melting of northern hemisphere glaciers is an ongoing process that has worsened in recent years.
“Since about 1990, the rate at which these glaciers are shrinking has really accelerated,” said Tom Neumann, who also points out that the St. Patrick’s Bay ice caps will not be the last glaciers to disappear. Even though their areas were tiny, he argues that their loss is worrying.
“We should be concerned about this because even though it is just a small glacier somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, all of these glaciers collectively contribute to sea level rise.”
Thanks to significant technological advances in satellite monitoring, scientists are learning much more about the changes occurring on Earth as a result of global warming.
“We now have much better tools to make better predictions of how these ice caps are going to change.”
Last year, the disappearance of the Okjökull glacier in Iceland marked the first disappearance of a glacier due to climate change.
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