Canada's St Patrick Bay ice caps disappear as predicted in 2017

Two Canadian ice caps situated on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, have disappeared, as per NASA satellite imagery.

In 2017, a paper by National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) was published in The Cryosphere, which predicted that the St. Patrick Bay ice caps would disappear in the next five years. This prediction was true after images came in from NASA's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER).

Mark Serreze, who is the director of NSIDC, is also a Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was the lead author of the prediction published in 2017. He first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student and visited the ice caps along with his advisor, Ray Bradley, of the University of Massachusetts.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

"When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape," said Serreze. "To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away."

In 2017, the scientists compared the situation of the ice caps through images taken from ASTER. The scientists compared the image taken in July 2015 to the picture taken from August of 1959. It was found that, from 1959 to 2015, the ice caps had been reduced to only five per cent of their former area. The area saw a drastic reduce between 2014 and 2015.

The latest images of the disappeared ice caps were taken on July 14, 2020.

"We've long known that as climate change takes hold, the effects would be especially pronounced in the Arctic," said Serreze. "But the death of those two little caps that I once knew so well has made climate change very personal. All that's left are some photographs and a lot of memories."