The Canadian Ice Island Drift, Deterioration and Detection (CI2D3) Database

Abstract

Three recent calving events from the Petermann Glacier, northwest Greenland (80°45′N, 60°45′W) generated hundreds of individual ice islands that traversed through Nares Strait, Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea. The calving events of July 2008, August 2010 and July 2012 resulted in the reported loss of 30, 253 and 130 km2 from the Petermann Ice Tongue (Münchow and others, 2014). These large, tabular icebergs (as they are referred to in the Antarctic) were observed to drift as far south as Newfoundland, with one example being the April 2012 observation at 42°N of a 400 m-long piece that likely originated from the 2010 calving event (Capt. P. Radovan, personal communication). Sometimes smaller pieces generated through fracturing are referred to as ice island fragments (CIS, 2005). We only use the term ’ice islands’ for simplicity. The substantial masses of ice islands make them potential hazards to shipping and offshore oil and gas activities off the East Coast of Canada. They also play a role in the spatial dispersion of fresh water from the Greenland Ice Sheet (Marson and others, 2017) and can be of local importance to marine ecosystems by altering the chemical and physical composition of the water column (Stern and others, 2015) and creating special habitats for phytoplankton, diatoms, bacteria and krill (Vernet and others, 2012; Smith and others, 2013). They can also provide temporary habitat to marine mammals; hundreds of seals were observed on Petermann Ice Island (PII)-A in the southern Labrador Sea in 2011, and seven to ten polar bears were observed on PII-B-1 when it was grounded off the east coast of Baffin Island in 2012 (Halliday and others, 2012; C. Packham, personal communication). The presence of ice islands in this region tends to be inter mittent (Newell, 1993; Johannessen and others, 2011). As a result, their dynamics and physical properties are less well documented than those of the smaller icebergs that drift into Newfoundland waters every year. The recent flux of ice islands from the Petermann Glacier and other northern Greenland glaciers has corresponded with the availability of satellite imagery of suitable temporal frequency, acquisi tion capability regardless of cloud cover or light conditions (a benefit of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors), and suf ficient spatial resolution to identify and monitor ice islands. Collaborators at the Water and Ice Research Laboratory (WIRL) at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) and the Canadian Ice Service (CIS; Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), Ottawa, Canada) exploited a large quantity of valuable imagery from the CIS SAR data archive to generate a database of ice island observations. The infor mation contained within the Canadian Ice Island Drift, Deterioration and Detection (CI2D3) Database will be useful in a variety of scientific and engineering studies, and will ultimately lead to a better understanding of these features and the role they play in the ocean environment. Here we provide a description of the unique database’s contents and the workflow used to create it. We also demonstrate some of the numerous topics that can be investigated with the data base with example analyses. The database will be publically available in the summer of 2018