The Canadian Arctic Archipelago Is Melting

Investigators from the University of Michigan say that the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) is currently in danger of melting down altogether, after losing massive volumes of ice in recent years.

Since accepting the truth of global warming – and the climate change it is inducing – experts have mainly focused their attention on ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland. These areas hold most of the world's ices, and so this level of attention is to be understood.

However, this also led them to ignore other important players, such as the CAA. Very few studies have looked at how the ice masses located in the southern portion of this region changed over time.

Analysis suggests that as much as 50 percent of all the ice volume being lost in the world annually is accounted for by other sources other than Greenland and Antarctica. The Canadian Arctic is one of the most important sources for the other 50 percent of lost ice, experts now say.

A new investigation into the behavior ices in this region exhibit was recently conducted by U-M researchers, who were led by expert Alex Gardner. Details of this work appear in the April 2011 issue of the top scientific journal Nature.

The main conclusion of the study was that tice in both the northern and southern Canadian Arctic Archipelago declined sharply betwen 2004–2006 (left) and 2007–2009 (right). In the new view, red indicates ice loss, while blue denotes ice gain.

Experts analyzed this region for about 6 years. For each of these years, the CAA lost 61 billion tones (gigatons) of ice. Worryingly, the lost masses increased from 31 gigatons annually between 2004 and 2006 to 92 gigatons from 2007 to 2009.

“Most of the ice loss is coming from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Alaska, Patagonia, the Himalayas, and the smaller ice masses surrounding the main Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,” Gardner says of the other ice sources except Greenland and Antarctica.

The latter add about 1.3 millimeters per year to global sea levels, whereas the former contribute an additional millimeter. “This means 1 percent of the land ice volume – mountain glaciers and ice caps – account for about half of all ice loss to the world’s oceans,” Gardner explains.

Data from the NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and the NASA Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) spacecraft were used to conduct this study.