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What was your first reaction?Mueller: Shock and sadness, in some ways. It’s like hearing bad news. It’s not an easy thing to get used to.White: I was really surprised. We think of these as semi-permanent features. But the breakup of these ice shelves is really quite inevitable at this point; along the coast of northern Ellesmere Island, we’re seeing open water and warmer temperatures almost consistently every summer.Copland: I got a text from Adrienne – I remember it clearly – and it just said: “The Milne ice shelf is gone.” I saw it and thought, ‘Crap, is that real?’ We’d both spent a lot of time working and living on the ice shelf, flying around it, studying it, so I texted her back and she described the process and the timing.
Luke Copland maintains a small weather station on the Milne ice shelf. Photograph: Adrienne White
Did you see it coming?Derek Mueller: All of the other ice shelves had broken up in past years, so it wasn’t a question of if for this particular ice shelf. It was a question of when.Luke Copland: If you look at the changes [over time], we’ve lost more than 90% of ice shelves in the last hundred years. We’d seen increased melting on the surface and the bottom [of the Milne], as well as long-term thinning. So we knew things were changing. Still, this ice shelf is huge, it’s bigger than large cities are, and it’s very strange to look at a satellite image one day and then look at [the same area] the next day, and the thing doesn’t exist anymore.Adrienne White: I always thought that the Milne was one of the more stable of the ice shelves; we had seen major breakups from the neighboring Serson and Peterson ice shelves, but the Milne seemed less susceptible to breakup. Part of my PhD was looking at what made it so stable, [including] the fact that it was so much thicker and attached to the walls of this fjord.That being said, it did have large fractures going across it that had been widening over the past few years. And we had seen the southern edge, the part of the ice shelf at the back of the fjord, starting to melt away more and more each year. Still, it was a shock to see the thickest, strongest part of the ice shelf break apart in this one big piece.Did you ever think you’d lose your equipment to an event like this?Mueller: It’s one of those things: We need the data year-round and we can’t stay there year-round, so it’s always a risk. You could put a weather station on a tripod on a glacier and it could fall over. There’s lots of instruments floating around the Arctic that people [had] put out. We got two full years of data from ours, so we count ourselves lucky in that sense.
The team’s camp on the ice shelf in July 2018. Photograph: Jérémie Bonneau
Does this change your plans to study the area?White: Absolutely not. It only shows us how important it is to continue monitoring this coastline and acquiring imagery in this specific area at even higher resolutionCopland: We’re shifting more towards [studying] satellite images. A colleague of mine actually died [in the field]; he was one of the world leaders studying glaciers in the Arctic, and he fell through a crevasse on the Greenland ice sheet. And it seems that that crevasse is filled with water, which is ultimately the result of climate change.There’s also been a shift over the last few years to studying [the Arctic] by helicopter. There’s so many measures that we can’t make unless we’re in the field; for example, we can’t really measure how thick the ice is from space. Moving forward, we’re still planning fieldwork, but being very careful and planning around safety.Mueller: The ice shelf is still half there. Our key study site on the ice shelf was lost, but we can find another study area potentially. Is it too late to save Canada’s remaining ice shelves from further breakup?Copland: For ice shelves, we can lose them very quickly; when they break up, that piece of the ice shelf is gone, it floats away. That takes a day. But to form an ice shelf, it takes hundreds to thousands of years, because you need a gradual buildup of snow and ice. You need a cold climate for centuries to form an ice shelf, but to lose one, you lose them immediately.White: This is really an area that has changed from [once] being completely ice-covered. You [used to] have old sea ice attached to the coast and ice shelves filling fjords and bays. Now, every year, we’ve seen open water along the entire coast of Ellesmere Island. The entire icescape has changed.Mueller: I always have to say yes, it’s too late. Ice shelves were already vulnerable to change. But the action we take now will prevent this – or mitigate it, anyway – in the future, in other places. It’s critically important that we heed these warnings. If we can make a change and hit these Paris climate accord targets, there is opportunity. If we can make that a hopeful once, I think that would be for the good.