[NASA] A Bare Summer for Barnes Ice Cap

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3. A Bare Summer for Barnes Ice Cap

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Meltwater channels cross the surface of the Barnes Ice Cap’s northeast side in this July 12, 2026, image from the

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(Operational Land Imager) on

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, with many channels reaching the ice edge.

NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

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Meltwater ponds in vivid blue pools on the surface of the Barnes Ice Cap’s southwest side in this July 12, 2026, image from the

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(Operational Land Imager) on

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.

NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

For most of the year, the Barnes Ice Cap in the ********* Arctic lies quiet under a blanket of snow. By summer, that snow melts back, and the ice cap transforms in texture, its bare ice dotted with turquoise ponds and its surface threaded with meltwater channels. In summer 2026, this seasonal awakening arrived fast and early.

Located in the center of Baffin Island, the ice cap is a remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which once covered much of northern North America. Today, the bowling-pin-shaped ice cap spans around 5,700 square kilometers (2,200 square miles), with ice up to about 730 meters (2,400 feet) thick. Like most of the

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, the Barnes Ice Cap is

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.  

The ice cap entered the 2026 melt season with an already-thin snowpack, and within a few weeks it had gone from snow-covered to mostly bare. By mid-July, its snow cover was effectively gone—“the earliest it has been this bare,” said glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College, who has

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using images from Landsat satellites and, when possible, field observations.

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Once snow cover melts away and bare ice is exposed, melting speeds up in the Arctic summer sunshine. Bare ice is darker than snow and absorbs more solar energy, so as the reflective snow cover disappears, the ice cap warms and melts faster. At the same time, a network of meltwater channels, many of which persist from year to year, becomes increasingly visible.

The 

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 (Operational Land Imager) on 

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acquired these images of the ice cap on July 12, 2026. Ponded blue meltwater dots the ice in places, and a vast network of meltwater channels spans the ice cap’s surface from its middle to its edges. Faint, curving gray lines indicate the many millennia of snow and ice accumulation that built the ice cap.

Barnes Ice Cap has been snow-free before, including in 2019, 2020, and 2024, Pelto said, but this year it happened sooner. The early snow loss and return of meltwater channels in 2026 means that meltwater runoff is starting earlier too, with implications for the ice cap’s

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. Water that might once have pooled and then percolated into any remaining snowpack and

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and refrozen there—adding mass back to the ice cap—instead gets whisked away. That surface drainage becomes more efficient as the season progresses and channels widen and connect.

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the ice cap thinned roughly 1 meter (3 feet) per year from 2000 to 2020, and over the past 40 years its margin has retreated about 4 meters (13 feet) per year on average. However, retreat rates vary widely across the ice cap. An especially fast-retreating area on the ice cap’s central-southern side pulled back by more than 400 meters (1,300 feet) total, or roughly 10 meters (33 feet) per year. This retreat is visible in the wide view above as a lighter brown band of freshly exposed earth and rock along that side of the ice cap.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the 

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. Story by Kathryn Hansen, with science review by Christopher Shuman, UMBC (retired).

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July 12, 2026

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References & Resources

• From a Glaciers Perspective (2026, July 18)
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  . Accessed July 31, 2026.
• Gardner, A.S., et al. (2011)
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  . Nature, 473, 357–360.
• Gilbert, A., et al. (2016)
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  . Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 121(9).
• NASA Earth Observatory (2025, December 3)
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  . Accessed July 31, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2010, October 10)
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  . Accessed July 31, 2026.
• Rippin, D.M., et al. (2026)
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  . Journal of Glaciology, 72, e21.

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