Ice arches supporting the Arctic’s ‘last ice zone’ could collapse due to warming trends

The “ last ice zone ” is a narrow band of ice covering approximately one million square miles on the northern coasts of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, which has long withstood the effects of climate change – until now.

A team from the University of Toronto found that the arches of ice holding frozen water could soon collapse due to the melt, causing large chunks of ice to float south into warmer regions.

Using satellite images, the researchers observed warming trends that show arches of ice are moving and losing mass twice as fast as the entire Arctic.

The loss of the last area of ​​ice could disrupt the entire ecosystem, including ice algae, brine channels, and photogenic species like polar bears.

Professor Kent Moore, who participated in the study, said: “This very old ice cream is our concern.

“The hope is that this region will persist through the middle of this century or even longer. And then, hopefully, we can eventually cool the planet.

“The ice will start to grow again, and then this area can act like a kind of seed.

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Ice arches generally develop at the northern and southern ends of Nares Strait and play a major role in maintaining the “last ice zone”.

“The Arctic Ocean is evolving into a younger, thinner and more mobile pack ice and the fate of its multi-year ice is becoming of increasing interest,” reads the study published in Nature Communications.

The team used sea ice motion recoveries captured by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite, which allowed them to record the behavior of the ice arches and changes in the amount of ice.

They used data from the arches of ice along the Nares Strait, which is 24 miles wide and 372 miles long.

This area stretches between Greenland and Ellesmere Island from the Arctic Ocean to Baffin Bay.

“The last area of ​​ice is losing ice mass twice as fast as the entire Arctic,” Moore said.

“We realized that this area might not be as stable as people think.

Data shows that the duration of ark formation has decreased over the past 20 years and the mass of ice exported through the Nares Strait has increased.

“It’s really deep enough to imagine a 100 kilometer long ice barrier that stays stationary for months at a time,” said Moore.

“It’s more than twice as long as the causeway of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana – the world’s longest continuous bridge over water.

“It is a testament to the strength of the ice.

However, the strength is waning, Moore warns.

Ice arches only form part of the year and when they break down in the spring, ice floats along Nares Strait – but it could be happening much sooner than previously observed .

“Each year, the reduction in duration is about a week,” Moore said.

“ They persisted for about 200 days and now they persist for about 150 days. There is a pretty remarkable reduction.

“We think it’s related to the fact that the ice is just thinner and the thinner ice is less stable.

A section of the last ice was considered the Tuvaijuittuq Marine Protected Area by the Canadian government in 2019.

Tuvaijuittuq is Inuktut for “the place where the ice never melts”.

Also last year, it was revealed to melt twice as fast as any other frost in the area.

The American Geophysical Union, an accredited earth science organization, shared a video showing that the oldest and thickest solid layer of frozen seawater has lost 95% of its mass over the past 35 years. – which, according to experts, is a “ dramatic indicator ” of climate change.

The area is now dominated by thinner, more mobile ice that is more likely to melt, which has “created stresses across the spectrum of ice-dependent organisms, from ice algae to polar bears.”

However, according to WWF-Canada, “even with effective action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, sea ice will shrink and last longer in winter.”