Airborne geophysical survey of ice caps in the Queen Elizabeth Islands, Arctic Canada

Previous studies have shown that between 2003 and 2009, 60±6 Gt of ice was lost each year from the Canadian Arctic (Gardner et al., 2013), making the region the largest cryospheric contributor to global sea level rise outside of the great ice sheets. Glacier ice in the Queen Elizabeth Islands (QEI) currently covers more than 100,000 km2, representing 20% of Earth's ice-covered land area outside of Greenland and Antarctica. The vast majority of this ice is stored within six ice caps located on Ellesmere, Devon and Axel Heiberg islands. Recent satellite observations of the outlet glaciers draining these ice caps have revealed significant velocity variability on inter-annual and multi-year timescales (Van Wychen et al., 2014), though the drivers of these dynamics are not yet understood. Here we present results obtained in May 2014 during an airborne geophysical survey of the ice caps of Axel Heiberg, Ellesmere and …