Arctic ice shelf now split in three, mission finds

CLIMATE: 'THE MAP OF CANADA IS CHANGING'

Arctic ice shelf now split in three, mission finds

KATHERINE O'NEILL
April 14, 2008

EUREKA, NUNAVUT -- A Canadian military operation at the top of the world that married science and Arctic sovereignty has discovered the largest remaining ice shelf in the northern hemisphere is breaking apart at an alarming rate.

A team of scientists and Canadian Rangers witnessed dramatic deep new cracks, 18 kilometres long and 40 metres wide, on the southern edge of Ward Hunt Ice Shelf while patrolling Ellesmere Island this month by snowmobile.

They found the ice shelf, which researchers first learned had split in two six years ago, has now broken into three. An ice shelf is a massive platform of floating sea ice connected to land.

"The map of Canada is changing," Derek Mueller, a Trent University researcher, said yesterday at Eureka's weather station, which is fewer than 1,200 kilometres south of the North Pole on the western coast of Ellesmere Island. "There are only five [ice shelves] left on Ellesmere, but almost 100 years ago the entire coastline was covered in ice shelves."

Mr. Mueller, who participated in Operation Nunalivut - Inuktitut for "the land is ours" - said deteriorating ice conditions are worrisome and consistent with other indicators of climate change that have been documented in the largely uninhabited, frozen region.

The $1-million military mission, which began March 28 and covered thousands of kilometres, wrapped up yesterday in Eureka, which is surrounded by sweeping, snow-covered mountains. The military flew in a large group, including reporters, academics and one U.S. government representative, a consul-general based in Calgary, to witness the event.

Brigadier-General Chris Whitecross, commander of the military in the Arctic, said the Canadian Forces "couldn't pass up the opportunity" to invite scientists to accompany the Rangers, a group of part-time reservists, mostly Inuit, on the operation.

It was the military's eighth high-Arctic patrol since 2002, and was meant to test its capabilities in the barren region, which makes up about 40 per cent of Canada's total land mass.

Brig.-Gen. Whitecross said scientific research will assist the military in maintaining control and a presence at the top of the world, which has never been easy because of extreme weather and difficult terrain.

Traffic of all types has increased in the Canadian Arctic as previously frozen waterways, including the fabled Northwest Passage - an invaluable maritime shortcut between Asia and Europe - have become open for longer periods and the rush for access and control of land and water in this resource-rich pocket of the world has ramped up among energy-hungry nations. Russia, Canada and Denmark are all currently conducting complex scientific research to file international claims that they are physically connected to the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range that stretches to an area between northern Ellesmere Island and Greenland from Siberia. The area is potentially rich in massive oil-and-gas reserves.

For several years, Canada's military presence in the North has been carried out cheaply compared with other Arctic nations. However, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government has vowed to change that, and has made several expensive promises, including recent ones to build a new deep-sea port in Nanisivik and a new Arctic military training facility in Resolute Bay.

Whitney Lackenbauer, a history professor at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ont., said the last time a federal government showed this much interest in the Arctic was under Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker.

"The real question now is whether or not this government, who are making proclamations that we haven't heard for 50 years, are actually willing to put their money where their mouths are."

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Ward Hunt Ice Shelf

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, located on the north coast of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada. It is 443 square kilometers in size, and has been in place for approximately 3,000 years as part of a continuous ice shelf that encompasses the northern coast of Ellesmere Island until the beginning of the twentieth century. During the twentieth century the Ellesmere Ice Shelf broke up into six separate shelves, the largest being Ward Hunt. In 2005 one of the other shelves, Ayles Ice Shelf, calved completely.

The Ellesmere ice shelf was documented by the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76, in which Lieutenant Pelham Aldrich's party went from Cape Sheridan (82.47°N, 61.50°W) west to Cape Alert (82.27°N, 85.55°W), including the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.[1]

The Ward Hunt ice sheet began breaking up approximately 100 years ago, but was believed to have stabilized by the early 1980s. However, in April 2000, satellite images revealed that a large crack in the ice had begun to form, and in 2003, it was announced that the ice sheet had split completely in two in 2002, releasing a huge pool of fresh water from the largest epishelf lake in the Northern Hemisphere, located in Disraeli Fjord.[2] In April 2008, it was discovered that the shelf was fractured into dozens of deep, multi-faceted cracks.[3] It seems likely the shelf is disintegrating.

The icebergs released by the breakup now pose a potential danger to shipping and offshore development in the region. Loss of microbial ecosystems caused by the release of the freshwater may also have far-ranging ecological impacts.

The breakup of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is tied to steady and dramatic increases in the average temperature of the region over the past decades, correlated with global warming.

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