![]() Patrick Bay ice caps sit on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island, between approximately 750 and 900 meters in elevation. Patrick Bay ice cap during expansion of the stake network in 1983. Serreze left the ice caps in early August of 1983, never to return again.įield assistant Mike Palecki drills into the St. But 1983 was cooler, feeding the ice cap. The summer of 1982 was warm, and the ice cap lost mass. Field assistant Mike Palecki helped Serreze to expand the stake network the next summer. Monitoring changes in the distance between the top of the stakes and the ice surface, together with measurements of the water equivalent of the overlying snow cover, would allow Serreze and future scientists to determine whether the ice cap was gaining or losing mass. They also installed a network of aluminum stakes on the larger of the two ice caps. As part of the study, Serreze and Bradley set up a series of stations to measure air temperature and the surface energy balance of the ice caps and surrounding tundra. He hoped the process might shed some light on how the continental ice sheets of the Pleistocene initiated. He wanted to test an idea: If the climate cooled a bit, feedback processes would kick in that would allow such ice caps to quickly grow. Patrick Bay ice caps on the local climate. Under the guidance of renowned climate scientist Ray Bradley of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Serreze focused on determining the impact of the St. When Serreze first visited the ice caps, not many scientists were talking about global warming, and there was even some talk of global cooling. I had a very personal relationship with them.” Serreze reflected on his time there, and said, “I knew every quirk, nook, and cranny of those little ice caps. Their imminent demise has hit Serreze, now NSIDC Director, at a personal level. These ice caps have dramatically shrunk over the past fifty years and and are likely to soon disappear entirely. Patrick Bay on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. SerrezeĪs a young graduate student, Mark Serreze spent the summers of 19 studying two ice caps near St. This illustration shows northeastern Ellesmere Island and the location of the St. Exchange for Observations and Local Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA).NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC).Greenland Today & Antarctic Ice Sheet Today.A part of CIRES at the University of Colorado Boulder
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