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Holocene History of Arctic Ice Shelves

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Arctic Ice Shelves and Ice Islands

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Abstract

The modern Ellesmere ice shelves constitute the oldest landfast sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, originally described by late nineteenth century sledging expeditions. At that time, the ‘Ellesmere Ice Shelf’ formed a contiguous, coastal apron that extended hundreds of kilometres in length and covered up to 9000 km2. By the mid-twentieth century the Ellesmere Ice Shelf was reduced to several large remnants and half its original area. Early efforts to document the age of ice shelf inception used conventional radiocarbon dating of internal, aeolian layers and marine organisms incorporated by basal accretion, all providing problematic results. The most widely cited age (3000 14C yr before present (BP)) was provided by a radiocarbon date on driftwood stranded behind the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.

Here we constrain the age of ice shelf inception based on 69 accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates on driftwood collected from raised marine shorelines inland of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, including adjacent fiords deglaciated ~9500 cal yr BP. Driftwood entered Disraeli Fiord, behind the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, as well as Phillips Inlet to the east, continuously from 9500 to 5500 cal yr BP, after which it abruptly terminated until present. This termination is interpreted to record blockage of the coast by establishment of multiyear landfast sea ice, rather than the lack of driftwood availability due to changing ocean currents, because driftwood delivery continued farther east at several locations through the same interval. This driftwood delivery was favoured by the seasonal expansion of the Lincoln Sea polynya that extends from northern Nares Strait to Clements Markham Inlet.

The radiocarbon chronology of entrapped driftwood behind the former Ellesmere Ice Shelf provides a proxy for the severity of Arctic Ocean pack ice with which it co-varies. This record extends back at least five millennia, far beyond the four decades of satellite surveillance, demonstrating that modern sea ice reduction extends back to the early twentieth century. The dramatic acceleration of seasonal pack ice reduction in the Arctic Ocean during the early twenty-first century heralds the imminent demise of the remaining ice shelf remnants across northern Ellesmere Island, considered an unprecedented event on the scale of millennia. Fiords adjacent to the former Ellesmere Ice Shelf—historically occupied by mulit-year landfast sea ice—have also become seasonally ice-free within the last decade.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1007/978-94-024-1101-0_16

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Acknowledgements

Fieldwork responsible for the collection of the driftwood reported here was logistically supported by the Polar Continental Shelf Project, NRCan, Ottawa, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This northern Ellesmere Island fieldwork was conducted by former graduate students at the University of Alberta: Jan Bednarski, Tom Stewart, Don Lemmen and David Evans whose collections now reside within Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (U of A). Additional former students from the University of Alberta are also acknowledged for assistance in the field: Doug Calvert, Tim Fisher, Philip Friend, Ulrika Hawkins, Brian Szuster, Maria Matishak, Val Sloan, and Richard England. Throughout this field research, financial support was provided by NSERC Discovery Grants to J. England and by grants awarded to graduate students (above) by the Canadian Circumpolar Institute (University of Alberta). The opportunity to finally analyze many undated samples stored for several decades was facilitated by the award of an NSERC Northern Research Chair to J. England (2002–2012). We thank Jan Bednarski, Pacific Geoscience Centre, Geological Survey of Canada (Sydney, B.C.), and Art Dyke, Terrain Sciences Division, Geological Survey of Canada (Ottawa), for helpful formal reviews on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    John H. England & Thomas R. Lakeman

  2. Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK

    David J. A. Evans

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  1. John H. England
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  2. David J. A. Evans
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Correspondence to John H. England .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Luke Copland

  2. Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Derek Mueller

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England, J.H., Evans, D.J.A., Lakeman, T.R. (2017). Holocene History of Arctic Ice Shelves. In: Copland, L., Mueller, D. (eds) Arctic Ice Shelves and Ice Islands. Springer Polar Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1101-0_7

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