Abstract
ABSTRACTUsing a variety of optical satellite scenes, this study quantifies the change in the areal extent of 1773 glaciers across Northern Ellesmere Island between ~1999 and ~2015. Our results show that the regional ice coverage decreased by 1705.3 km2over the ~16-year period, a loss of ~5.9%. Ice shelves had the greatest losses relative to their size, of ~42.4%. Glaciers feeding into ice shelves reduced in area by 4.7%, while tidewater glaciers reduced in area by 3.3%. Marine-terminating glaciers with floating ice tongues reduced in area by 4.9%, and 19 of these 27 ice tongues disintegrated, causing these glaciers to retreat to their grounding lines. Land-terminating glaciers lost 4.9% of their 1999 area, including the complete loss of three small ice caps (<1.5 km2). Our study highlights the high sensitivity of the ice cover of Northern Ellesmere Island to recent climate warming and the continued losses that are likely to occur in the future. In particular, the ice masses most susceptible to further losses are marine-terminating glaciers with floating termini and small land-terminating ice caps at low elevations.
Highlights
The Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) contains ∼150 000 km2 of glacier ice, making this region the most glaciated in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica (Pfeffer and others, 2014)
It is clear that the ice cover of Northern Ellesmere Island has been undergoing widespread loss since 1999, with two trends standing out among the observations: (1) The dominance of the shrinkage of relatively small, low elevation glaciers in terms of relative area loss; (2) The substantial loss of floating ice from ice shelves and ice tongues along the northern coast
We examine the relationships between large area changes and small land-terminating glaciers, together with changes in the equilibrium line altitude (ELA) and area ratio (AAR)
Summary
The Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) contains ∼150 000 km of glacier ice, making this region the most glaciated in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica (Pfeffer and others, 2014). Based on satellite gravimetry measurements, this region has become the single largest contributor to eustatic sea-level rise outside of the major ice sheets since 2003 (Harig and Simons, 2016), during a period of rapid warming of glacier surface temperatures (Mortimer and others, 2016). The ice in this area can be separated into two groups, the southern area that spans Baffin (∼36 839 km2) and Bylot (∼4859 km2) islands, and the northern area (107 488 km2) that spans the Queen Elizabeth Islands, of which 27 556 km (all ∼1960 areas) is located on Northern Ellesmere Island (Fig. 1; Andrews, 2002; Sharp and others, 2014). Since 2000, a few studies have been conducted on Northern Ellesmere Island to assess changes in ice shelf area (e.g., Copland and others, 2007; Mueller and others, 2017a, b) and the changes of individual ice caps (Braun and others, 2004; Serreze and others, 2017), but no detailed regional assessment of glacier changes has been conducted
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