After 2.5 Million Years, Last Remnant Of Laurentide Ice Sheet Melting Away On Baffin Island
From a boardwalk overlooking a deserted Ohio Street Beach in the throes of winter, it’s not hard to imagine the last ice age. A blanket of fresh snow covers the shoreline and pale blue ice glazes over Lake Michigan as far as the eye can see. But this is nothing. Twenty thousand years ago, Chicago was encased in ice roughly 3,000 feet thick — twice the height of Willis Tower.
All that’s left of the colossal ice sheet that sprawled over much of North America and formed the Great Lakes is a kernel of ice in the Canadian Arctic — and it’s dwindling fast. Today, the Barnes Ice Cap, a glacier about the size of Delaware on Baffin Island in Canada, is the last remnant of the mighty Laurentide Ice Sheet. But after 2,000 years of stability, the ice cap is expected to vanish in the next 300 years as an unparalleled rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases has brought on an alarming rate of melting since the 1960s.
Scientists say the warmth of the past century exceeds any in the last 115,000 years, and perhaps even longer, according to a study published last month. “If the Barnes Ice Cap has almost never disappeared in 2.5 million years, and it’s disappearing now, then it’s giving us the context that it’s warm as it’s ever been in the last 2.5 million years,” said Gifford Miller, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a researcher who has extensively studied the ice cap on Baffin Island.
The ice cap’s improbable end is hardly a global concern by itself, but it could be a harbinger of what lies ahead for other massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, scientists say. While the Great Lakes provided a catchall for glacial meltwater, elsewhere these thawing ice sheets could send a deluge of fresh water into the oceans, contributing to sea level rise and possibly disrupting ocean currents.
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