The Alfred Ernest Ice Shelf is an ice shelf on the north-west part of Ellesmere Island

Ellesmere Island

Ellesmere Island is part of the Qikiqtaaluk Region of the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Lying within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, it is considered part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, with Cape Columbia being the most northerly point of land in Canada...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. This ice mass is one of four remaining ice shelves on the island.

This ice shelf lies between Alert Point and Cape Woods on Wootton Peninsula. The Alfred Ernest Ice Shelf is regarded as a composite ice shelf that is composed of an inner unit of glacial origin and a trunk glacier originating from sea ice.

Some time around 1955, a section of the ice shelf broke off. It is now called the ARLIS-II ice island.

Further reading

• Glaciers of North America - Canada, Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World, U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1386 – J – 1, pg J111 – J143

• Carsten Braun, Douglas R. Hardy, and Raymond S. Bradley, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 109, (2004). Surface mass balance of the Ward Hunt Ice

• Rise and Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, Roy M. Koerner

• Earth Observatory, by: Nasa Were a Part of the Earths Enterprise

• Jiancheng Zheng, Akira Kudo, David A. Fisher, Erik W. Blake and M. Gerasimoff, The Holocene 8, 4 (1998) pg. 413 – 421, Solid electrical conductivity (ECM) from four, Agassiz ice cores, Ellesmere Island NWT, Canada: high-resolution signal and noise over the last millennium and low resolution over the Holocene