Nature

An Ice Chunk The Size of Manhattan Is Wandering in Northern Canada

It could destroy oil rigs in Alaska

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

25th of May 2007, 10:51 GMT

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A 2005 satellite image of the Alyes (still) Ice Shelf

In 2006, NASA MODIS Terra satellite discovered the Alyes Ice Island, off the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, at about 800 km (497 miles) from the North Pole.

An US-Canadian team has installed this week beacons on the massive ice island to track down its movements through the Arctic Ocean in Canada's far north.

The

Alyes Ice Island, 16 km long and 5 km wide (10x3 miles), broke from Ellesmere Island, located in the Arctic archipelago close to Greenland, in August 2005, but the ice chunk was identified only in 2006. The violent break induced a local quake that was caught by Canadian seismographs 250 km (155 mi) away, but none realized what had occurred.

The mission of tracking down the huge ice island is accomplished by the same team that reconstructed the events based on seismic readings and satellite images: geographer Luke Copland of the University of Ottawa and Derek Mueller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The researchers are worried that the ice island could drift towards Alaska, menacing the offshore oil rigs.

By now, the island has moved less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the south since its break-off. "This loss is the biggest in 25 years, but it continues the loss that occurred within the last century. Almost 90 % of the ice cover in the region had been lost since it was first discovered during a polar expedition in 1906," said Coper in December.

What's worrying the researchers is that with the global warming, the five area glaciers encountered in Ellesmere Island could not refuel themselves, as before, and crumble into the ocean.

The planet's polar regions are the most affected by the current global warming, the Arctic being more affected than the Antarctic. Arctic temperatures have been rising twice as fast as elsewhere and by 2100, the Ocean Arctic could be free of ice.

TAGS:

ice | glacier | warming

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