TORONTO -- New NASA satellite imagery shows the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in Nunavut have completely disappeared, as predicted by a group of scientists three years earlier.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), recent images from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument aboard NASA鈥檚 Terra satellite confirm that the ice caps located on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island are gone.
Mark Serreze, the director of the NSIDC and a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, first visited the ice caps in St. Patrick Bay in 1982 when he was a graduate student.
鈥淲hen I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape,鈥� Serreze said in a statement Thursday. 鈥淭o watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.鈥�
In 2017, Serreze and a team of scientists predicted the ice caps would melt completely within five years in published in the journal The Cryosphere. They came to this conclusion by comparing satellite data from July 2015 to vertical aerial photographs taken in August of 1959.
The team found that between those years, the ice caps had been reduced to a mere five per cent of their former area.
The scientists said 2015 was a particularly devastating year for the ice caps when they noticeably shrank due to an especially warm summer.
In the images captured by NASA鈥檚 ASTER instrument on July 14, the ice caps are nowhere to be seen.
鈥淲e鈥檝e long known that as climate change takes hold, the effects would be especially pronounced in the Arctic,鈥� Serreze explained. 鈥淏ut the death of those two little caps that I once knew so well has made climate change very personal. All that鈥檚 left are some photographs and a lot of memories.鈥�
The melted ice caps were one half of a group of small ice caps on the Hazen Plateau, which formed during the Little Ice Age several centuries ago, according to the NSIDC.
The other half of the group 鈥� the Murray and Simmons ice caps 鈥� are located at a higher elevation and are faring better than the St. Patrick Bay ones did. However, scientists from the NSIDC predicted their demise would be 鈥渋mminent鈥� too.
