For most of the year, ice blankets the waterways of the northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago. But during the brief summer melt season, the stark white and gray landscape transforms into a colorful, dynamic environment. On a particularly striking day in 2022, sediment plumes and fractured sea ice traced swirling eddies in a branch of the Nansen Sound fjord system.
These satellite images show a section of Cañon Fiord, located about 115 kilometers (70 miles) southeast of the Eureka research station on west-central Ellesmere Island. Waters from the fjord flow into Greely Fiord, which connects to Nansen Sound and ultimately the Arctic Ocean. The images were acquired by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on August 9, 2022.
Igor Dmitrenko, a physical oceanographer at the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba, has studied eddies in the fjord system and notes that the water’s turbidity, a measure of its cloudiness, remains low during the ice-covered season. Freshwater runoff—and the sediment it carries—drops sharply this time of year, and the formation of 2-meter-thick sea ice shields the surface from wind, suppressing mixing that would otherwise resuspend particles.
Summer presents a contrasting scenario. The detailed image below (top) shows that the sea ice in this part of the fjord has broken up, free to drift with the currents and wind. Note that some of the pieces are likely iceberg …