Abstract

The ice arches that usually develop at the northern and southern ends of Nares Strait play an important role in modulating the export of Arctic Ocean multi-year sea ice. The Arctic Ocean is evolving towards an ice pack that is younger, thinner, and more mobile and the fate of its multi-year ice is becoming of increasing interest. Here, we use sea ice motion retrievals from Sentinel-1 imagery to report on the recent behavior of these ice arches and the associated ice fluxes. We show that the duration of arch formation has decreased over the past 20 years, while the ice area and volume fluxes along Nares Strait have both increased. These results suggest that a transition is underway towards a state where the formation of these arches will become atypical with a concomitant increase in the export of multi-year ice accelerating the transition towards a younger and thinner Arctic ice pack. Ice arches that form along Nares Strait, which separates Greenland and Ellesmere Island, act to reduce the export of thick multi-year ice out of the Arctic. Here, we show that there has been a recent trend towards shorter duration arch formation that has resulted in enhanced transport of ice along the strait.

Keywords

Arctic ice packSea iceArcticArchGeologyOceanographyDrift iceClimatologyGeography

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Publication Info

Year
2021
Type
article
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
1-1
Citations
5052
Access
Closed

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5052
OpenAlex
7
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Cite This

G. W. K. Moore, Stephen Howell, Mike Brady et al. (2021). Anomalous collapses of Nares Strait ice arches leads to enhanced export of Arctic sea ice. Nature Communications , 12 (1) , 1-1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20314-w

Identifiers

DOI
10.1038/s41467-020-20314-w
PMID
33397941
PMCID
PMC7782487

Data Quality

Data completeness: 81%