Melting glaciers leave behind three new islands in the Arctic Ocean

There are three new islands in the thawing Arctic, each left behind by melting glaciers. 

As warming masses of ice retreat away from the rugged outcroppings at the edge of the Devon Ice Cap in the Canadian Arctic, glaciologist Mauri Pelto recently spotted on satellite images the “release,” or freeing, of these three new islands, and posted the images online. This geographic transformation is a continuation of the accelerating change now unfolding in the Arctic, where things are warming over twice as fast as the rest of the planet — and in some places even faster.

“The far north Canadian Arctic is one of the most quickly warming places in the world,” Luke Copland, who researches glaciers and ice caps at the University of Ottawa, said in an interview. 

This warming air is simply accelerating the melting of the massive Devon Ice Cap, said Copland. 

The three middle arrows show the rocky points in 2000 that became islands by 2017.

The three new islands may not be giants, but they certainly aren’t small. These isles are around half a kilometer across, Pelto, the director of the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project at Nichols College, said in an interview.

“On an average island you could fit a small town,” noted Copland. “These are not tiny pieces of rock.”

“This is probably the biggest group [of islands] I’ve seen being released,” added Pelto.

The retreat of these glaciers is enhanced by a feedback loop, known as the albedo effect, which is the ability of land to reflect sunlight back into space — and thus reduce warming. Snow is a superb sunlight reflector, but warm temperatures melt snow, leaving the glaciers to absorb heat and melt even faster. 

As the image above, from August 14, 2017, shows, there’s little bright snow over the surface compared to 17 years earlier.

“That’s certainly not a good sign for any glacier,” said Pelto.

A NASA graph shows the decreasing mass of Greenland’s ice sheets since 2002.

The glaciers might be getting hit from the bottom, too. To the east, in Greenland, scientists have observed relatively warmer ocean waters seeping up into the bottom of ice sheets. As freshwater melts into the ocean, it stirs up ocean waters, which eats away at the ice.

“We could get melting from the top down, and the bottom up,” Martin Sharp, who researches glacier-climate interactions in the Canadian Arctic, said in an interview.

Although new islands are now present off the Devon Ice Cap, the melting glaciers are ubiquitous throughout the region. 

“Pretty much everywhere in the Canadian Arctic the glaciers have been getting smaller,” said Sharp.

Arctic scientists have observed this shrinking trend since the 1960s, but things began to ramp up in the late 1990s, about two decades before these islands were released.

“I would say in the mid to late nineties there was a definite kick, and everything sped up around that point,” said Sharp. 

“We have warming by 1 degree Celsius in the last 20 years or so,” added Copland. “That’s a doubling in how much ice gets lost each year.”

Copland has invested a lot of time researching and visiting nearby Northern Ellesmere Island. He recently walked on bedrock that just 15 years ago had been covered by a thick glacier. 

“We’re losing entire small glaciers,” he said. 

This trend will almost certainly continue. 

“In terms of looking toward future, we’re not seeing evidence for the slowdown of what’s happening,” said Copland. “It’s very easy to lose and melt glaciers. They’ll retreat for the next several hundred years.”