The Milne Ice Shelf, a fragment of the former
Ellesmere Ice Shelf, is located in the
Qikiqtaaluk Region,
Nunavut, Canada. It is the second largest
ice shelf
An ice shelf is a large floating platform of ice that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are only found in Antarctica, Greenland, Northern Canada, and the Russian Arctic. The ...
in the
Arctic Ocean
The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceans. It spans an area of approximately and is known as the coldest of all the oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, a ...
. Situated on the north-west coast of
Ellesmere Island, it is about west of
Alert, Nunavut.
In 1986, the ice shelf had an area of about , with a central thickness of . It had been the last ice shelf in the
Canadian Arctic to be fully intact until July 2020, when over 40 percent of the sheet collapsed within two days, a consequence of
global warming
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
. An uninhabited research camp was lost when the shelf collapsed. It included instruments for measuring water flow through the ice shelf.
References
Ice shelves of Qikiqtaaluk Region
{{QikiqtaalukNU-geo-stub