Glacier area changes on Baffin Island from 2000 to 2019 derived from Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite images

Glaciers on Baffin Island present a mixture of abundant small to a few very large ice caps (Barnes, Penny) as well as thousands of valley glaciers, cirques and ice patches. Their large overall area (about 40,000 km²) combined with strong surface melting is responsible for their large contribution to sea-level rise over the past decades. However, area changes over the same time period are largely unknown, as a reliable glacier inventory for the year 2000 has only become available very recently. The previous version suffered from missing glaciers and missing debris cover on glaciers or outlines were outdated and had too large extents.

Here we present the results of a new glacier inventory for the entire region as obtained from Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9 satellite images acquired within a few days of August 2019. Although glacier mapping conditions were excellent in regard to seasonal snow, glacier boundaries were often polluted by dark material that was excluded from the applied automated mapping with a band ratio. Hence, all glacier boundaries were checked and manually adjusted when required. To obtain glacier specific area change rates, we used the same revised drainage divides as for the recent year 2000 inventory in RGI 7.0.

Overall, glacier area decreased by 10% from 2000 to 2019 i.e. at a rate of 0.54% per year. Thereby, glaciers <1 km² contribute 3% to the total area but 13% to the loss, whereas glaciers >10 km² contribute 70% to the total area and 40% to the loss. The area of Barnes Ice Cap decreased by 1.15%. As in other regions with glaciers, the shrinkage rate and scatter of values increases towards smaller glaciers and several glaciers melted away completely. Also some larger ice caps at low elevations suffered from substantial shrinkage and disintegration by down-wasting. The increasing extent of rock outcrops in the accumulation area of larger glaciers confirm the observed surface lowering over this period.