Images From Space Show Arctic Ice Melting

Sea ice can be seen crumbling back into the ocean in images taken from space.

The NASA pictures, taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite, show the "fast ice" in the Amundsen Gulf in northern Canada breaking up rapidly in the spring temperatures.

On May 22, the ice can be seen intact, while only 8 days later, chunks of the ice had splintered off, floating into the Beaufort Sea.

Arctic sea ice is ice that forms on the Arctic Ocean during the winter months. The amount of ice covering the ocean fluctuates with the seasons, with the coverage during September amounting to half that of the March peak.

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Fast ice is stationary sea ice that is "fastened" to the coastline or sea floor. When the ice breaks off, it becomes drift ice. The fast ice in the Amundsen Gulf tends to rapidly melt in the spring, leaving the gulf often ice-free by August.

"Winds played an important role in this breakup," Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told NASA Earth Observatory.

There was an area of low pressure that fueled strong winds, which aided to break up the ice that had already been weakened by several breakups during the spring.

"Back then, it was so cold that the ice started to regrow right away, but the ice that regrew was so thin that it was pre-conditioned to easily break up again later," Meier said.

The breakup was earlier than the average for the Amundsen Gulf, but that area of ocean is often inconsistent in its melting dates.

"Over a period of two decades, the Amundsen Gulf had the highest interannual variability of anywhere across the entire Northwest Canadian Arctic," Eleanor Wratten, a researcher at Northumbria University, told NASA Earth Observatory. "We saw the timing of breakup change considerably from one year to the next, but the general pattern looked similar to what you see here. Ice usually remains in the southern bays the longest, with breakup veering toward the strait in the southeastern portion of the gulf."

This year, Arctic sea ice hit record lows during its winter peak, seeing its fifth-lowest ice cover since satellite records began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

The ice on the day it peaked in the area—March 6—was 5.64 million square miles, about 398,000 square miles short of the average maximum between 1981 and 2010. According to NASA, the winter extent and summer extent of the ice is shrinking. September Arctic sea ice is now shrinking at a rate of 12.6 percent per decade.

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