Arctic ice cap slides into the Ocean

Satellite images have revealed that a remote Arctic ice cap has thinned by more than 50 metres since 2012 - about one sixth of its original thickness - and that it is now flowing 25 times faster. A team led by scientists from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at the University of Leeds combined observations from eight satellite missions, including Sentinel-1A and CryoSat, with results from regional climate models, to unravel the story of ice decline. The findings show that over the last two decades, ice loss from the south-east region of Austfonna, located in the Svalbard archipelago, has increased significantly. In this time, ice flow has accelerated to speeds of several kilometres per year, and ice thinning has spread more than 50km inland – to within 10km of the summit. “These results provide a clear example of just how quickly ice caps can evolve, and highlight the challenges associated with making projections of their future contribution to sea level rise,” said the study’s lead author Dr Mal McMillan, a member of the CPOM team from the University of Leeds. The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters and reported online today by the European Space Agency (ESA), is the first to make use of measurements from ESA’s latest Earth observation satellite, Sentinel-1A. Sentinel-1A, the first satellite developed for Europe’s Copernicus programme, was launched in April last year, while CryoSat has been in orbit since 2010.