Federal service tracking gigantic ice island adrift in Arctic

Randy Boswell
POSTMEDIA NEWS

The Canadian Ice Service, the federal agency that monitors the state of the Northwest Passage and other Arctic shipping lanes, has successfully deposited a satellite beacon on a mammoth ice island that broke away from Greenland in August and is now drifting in two pieces in waters off Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island.

The record-setting glacier break that created Petermann Ice Island 2010 — launching a journey expected to last years and one that could menace offshore oil platforms in Atlantic Canada — was the most dramatic event during another severe summer meltdown for Arctic sea ice, which U.S. experts described this week as further proof that ice-free summers are coming to Northern Canada within 30 years.

When the ice island broke away from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier on Aug. 4, the 250-square-kilometre monolith became the biggest free-floating iceberg in the Arctic Ocean in nearly 50 years.

The birth of the 30-km-long behemoth was first documented by Canadian Ice Service forecasting specialist Trudy Wohlleben.

In early September, the ice island split in two after it collided with Joe Island in Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and Danish-controlled Greenland.

The Canadian Ice Service reported recently that the two pieces are about 160 and 85 square kilometres, respectively.

The smaller of the two — now identified as PII-A — was described as moving much more rapidly southward (about 40 km per day), reaching the entrance to the strait’s Kane Basin by mid-September and now nearly at the south end of Ellesmere Island.

The agency also announced that a beacon had been successfully deposited on the surface of PII-A, the drift route of which can be monitored at a public website linked to the Canadian Ice Service.

“Once the ice island exits Nares Strait and drifts into Baffin Bay and into areas where shipping activities take place, it could become a hazard to maritime interests,” the agency noted.

Earlier this week, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that Arctic ice cover had retreated from an end-of-winter maximum of about 14 million square kilometres to an end-of-summer minimum of about 4.6 million square kilometres as of Sept. 19.

That represents the third most severe ice retreat since scientists began satellite monitoring more than 30 years ago. And it meant that the four most severe meltdowns over that time have occurred in the past four years.

“All indications are that sea ice will continue to decline over the next several decades,” said NSIDC director Mark Serreze. “We are still looking at a seasonally ice-free Arctic in 20 to 30 years.”

The Colorado-based centre’s end-of-summer report also noted that the thickest and oldest sea ice in the region, defined as having remained intact for at least five years, “has now disappeared almost entirely from the Arctic.”

Less than 60,000 square kilometres of five-year-old ice was estimated to remain by the end of September. In the 1980s, the NSIDC stated, more than two million square kilometres of such ice typically survived the summer melt.

This August 23, 2010 NASA Earth Observatory image taken by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-colour image on August 16, 2010 which shows the ice island that calved off the Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland on August 5, 2010, continuing its slow migration down the fjord 11 days later. (PHOTO/NASA)