Canadian glaciers face 'big losses'

[OldLeatherneck]

The glaciers and ice caps of the archipelago cover some 146,000 square km

Quote from:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21699115

"The glaciers of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago will undergo a dramatic retreat this century if warming projections hold true.

A new study suggests the region's ice fields could lose perhaps as much as a fifth of their volume.

Such a melt would add 3.5cm to the height of the world's oceans. Only the ice of Greenland and Antarctica is expected to contribute more.

The assessment is reported in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.

"This is a very important part of the world where there has already been a lot of change," said lead author Jan Lenaerts from Utrecht University, Netherlands.

"And it is all the more important that we talk about it because it has been somewhat overshadowed by all the news of Greenland and Antarctica," he told BBC News.
"

[mspelto]

This is and you can see this occurring for example on Dexterity Ice Cap.

http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/dexterity-ice-cap-baffin-island/

[OldLeatherneck]

This is and you can see this occurring for example on Dexterity Ice Cap.

http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/dexterity-ice-cap-baffin-island/

mspelto,

Thanks for providing this information.  As we collect more measured data about all of the glaciers, in the Arctic as well as worldwide, we will begin to get a better picture as to how much and how fast sea-levels will be rising.

[Tor Bejnar]

Three New Islands Released from Devon Ice Cap, Canada
From a Glacier's Perspective   4 September 2018

The Devon Ice Cap on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic ice cap’s area has an area of 15,000 km², with a volume of 3980 km³. The ice cap has been the focus of an ongoing research program led by the University of Alberta Arctic and Alpine Research Group. The mass balance from 1960-2009 was cumulatively -5.6 m, with nine of the eleven most negative years occurring since 1998.  Noel  et al (2018) update this observation noting that Canadian Arctic ice caps have been losing mass for decades and that mass loss accelerated in 1996. This followed a significant warming (+1.1∘C), which increased the production of meltwater. This has led to widespread area losses.  White and Copland (2018) quantify the change in the areal extent of 1773 glaciers on Northern Ellesmere Island from 1999 to 2015. They found regional glacier area decreased by ∼6%, with not a single glacier increasing in areal extent.

East of Belcher Glacier, a large retreating tidewater outlet of the Devon Ice Cap, maps indicate a glacier terminating at Cape Caledon, a series of rocky Points on the southern side of the Lady Ann Strait.  Today the Cape Caledon Glacier no longer reaches these rocky Points that have now become islands. 
...

Landsat images, etc. at link in headline.  Devon Island location map from Wikipedia

Lady Ann Strait is on the north side of Devon Island.

Why reactivate this thread?  Well, Canadian glaciers just lost three islands, that's big!

I wonder what the update in four years will be.

[Phil.]

I believe the Hanseatic has been cruising there, do any of their website images show this glacier?
https://www.hl-cruises.com/ships/expeditions/ms-hanseatic/ships-position-webcam?webcam=20180905

[Alexander555]

How is that going to turn out ? In spring this year i was looking at that area near Svalbard. The sea was not frozen, and the air 2 meter above the surface was -15 degree C. So heat from the ocean is moving in. But conditions for snow stay intact. And we had plenty of snow in North-America. The summers are to warm to preserve the glaciers. And the winters are more than cold enough to turn all that extra moisture into snow. What kind of effects will that have ?

[maga]

The prediction is that there will be more snow in winter but it will (on average) melt earlier in a warmer climate. Both effects combine to warm up permafrost. The runoff of fresh water may also influence oceanic currents.

[Klondike Kat]

Extrapolating a small loss over a small time frame to a large loss over a large time frame is always a contentious proposition.

[Tom_Mazanec]

https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-maas-tours-canadas-melting-arctic/a-50036234
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Thursday toured Canada's far north, a vast but fragile region coveted by the United States as a potential defrosted "Northwest" shipping passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Little publicized is that since 2016, a German-Canadian research team coordinated by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute has been testing a "passive radar" method intended to help ships navigate the shoals and narrows of the Northwest Passage.