Breaking News

Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle resigns after shocking failures led to Trump assassination attempt
Lifestyle

Two Arctic ice caps have vanished as NASA reveals shock satellite images of global warming

By
Charlotte Edwards, The Sun
Published July 31, 2020, 5:08 p.m. ET
1 of 5
National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze conducted research on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps as a graduate student with the University of Massachusetts in 1982.
National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze conducted research on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps as a graduate student with the University of Massachusetts in 1982.Ray Bradley
These NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite images show the location where the St. Patrick Bay ice caps used to exist on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada.
These NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite images show the location where the St. Patrick Bay ice caps used to exist on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada.Bruce Raup
Advertisement
This outline of the St. Patrick Bay ice caps, taken from the 2017 The Cryosphere paper, is based on aerialphotography from August 1959, GPS surveys conducted during August 2001, and for August of 2014 and 2015 from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). It shows the area of the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1959, 2001, 2014, and 2015.
This outline of the St. Patrick Bay ice caps, taken from the 2017 The Cryosphere paper, is based on aerialphotography from August 1959, GPS surveys conducted during August 2001, and for August of 2014 and 2015 from NASA's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). It shows the area of the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1959, 2001, 2014, and 2015.NSIDC
Advertisement

Satellite analysis has revealed two ice caps in the Arctic have completely disappeared.

They’re victims of human-caused warming, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, researched Canada’s St. Patrick Bay ice caps in the 1980s when he was a student.

They used to be located on the Hazen Plateau of Canada’s Ellsmere Island.

Now all Serreze has left of them is a few photos.

The disappearance of the ice caps was confirmed by NASA’s Terra satellite.

Discover reported on Serreze’s shock at how quickly they vanished.

He said: “When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape.

“To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.”

He first visited the ice caps in 1982 but published a paper in 2017 predicting they would disappear in less than five years.

Unfortunately, him an his colleagues were right.

A post on the NSIDC website explains: “In 2017, scientists compared ASTER satellite data from July 2015 to vertical aerial photographs taken in August of 1959.

“They found that between 1959 and 2015, the ice caps had been reduced to only five percent of their former area, and shrank noticeably between 2014 and 2015 in response to the especially warm summer in 2015.

“The ice caps are absent from ASTER images taken on July 14, 2020.”

In 1959 the ice caps measured in at 2.8 square miles and 2.93 square km (1.1 square miles) respectively.

That means the larger of the two was just over two times as big as Central Park in New York.

Serreze told Discovery: “It was like watching a sick friend slowly waste away from some awful disease.

“I knew the end was coming, but still couldn’t be completely prepared for it.”

The ice caps at St. Patrick Bay were part of a the Hazen Plateau were believed to date back to the Little Ice Age.

The Little Ice Age was a period of cooling between the 14th and 19th centuries.

The ice caps that remain in the area are melting less quickly but experts still think they are doomed.

Serreze told Discovery: “Climate change is very, very real, and as long predicted, the Arctic is leading the way.

“We are geoengineering our planet, and we don’t seem to want to accept that we’re headed for a very different world.”