Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumIn 2017, NASA Predicted Disappearance Of 2 Canadian Arctic Ice Fields w/i 5 Yrs; It Only Took 3 Yrs
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 NASAs 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. When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape, Serreze said in a statement Thursday. To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.
In 2017, Serreze and a team of scientists predicted the ice caps would melt completely within five years in a research paper 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 NASAs ASTER instrument on July 14, the ice caps are nowhere to be seen.
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https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/two-canadian-ice-caps-have-completely-disappeared-satellite-imagery-shows-1.5047212