page_title: Barnes Ice Cap
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Barnes Ice Cap / Geography
caption_attribution_description: English: This natural-colour (photo-like) image shows winter ice hugging the coastline of Canada’s Baffin Island. Clouds often hover over the Arctic during the Northern Hemisphere summer, making cloud-free images such as this one relatively rare. Although a few wispy clouds appear in the upper right and lower left corners of this image, the delicate swirls of white running along the eastern edge of Baffin Island are sea ice. Eddies along Baffin Island’s coast have fashioned the ice into interlocking swirls, especially near Cumberland Sound. Farther north, a long band of ice holds fast to the shore east of Barnes Icecap. Although less inclined to move with the currents, this ice also shows signs of weakening, as its edges splinter, and pieces float away. The sea ice retreat captured in this image appears typical of seasonal melt. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, Arctic sea ice extent has declined sharply, experiencing a series of low summertime extents and poor wintertime recoveries.
context_page_description: The Barnes Ice Cap is an ice cap located in central Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada.
context_section_description: It covers close to 6,000 km² (2,300 sq mi) in the area of the Baffin Mountains. It has been thinning due to regional warming. Between 2004 and 2006, the ice cap  was thinning at a rate of 1 m (3 ft 3 in) per year.
  The ice cap contains Canada's oldest ice, some of it being over 20,000 years old. It is a remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of Canada during the last glacial period of the Earth's current ice age. Generator Lake is located at the southeastern end of the ice cap.
caption: The Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island.
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