Day 28
Position: N 78° 42' W 096° 09'
Distance traveled: 10.1 km / 6.2 mi

Another difficult day of travel, despite the 7.2 kilometers of flat travel that we got crossing the Ayles ice island. Despite the undulating surface of Alyes, flat in comparison to what we have been traveling on, our venture across the ice island was in no way speedy. The surface conditions were granular and there were large patches of deep snow. There also was an incident in which my sled fell a foot through a thin layer of ice which, as you can imagine, greatly supprised me. This phenomenon is caused by summer melt ponds freezing when winter comes. If the lake drains after the first few inches have frozen, it leaves a large air bubble large enough to devour a sled.

Ayles was once part of a massive ice shelf known as the Ellesmere Ice Shelf, which formed roughly ten thousand years ago during a time when Earth's temperature was slightly cooler. It's difficult to say how big the original ice shelf was, but estimates state that it would have been 95 percent larger than the eight smaller ice shelves that remain. Most of the ice disappeared by the late 1970s yielding some impressive ice islands that floated around the arctic ocean. During the last forty years there have been some major calving events, Ayles has been the most recent. Technically, Alyes actually went through two calving events, one which moved it out of its original location and further down the bay where it became stuck and for a while started to grow, and the second major event which yielded the ice island that we recently crossed.

We are also not the only people to visit the ice island, shortly after its break up two scientists, Derek Muller and Luke Copland, along with the BBC visited the island to set up scientific equipment and a locator beckon to track the movement of Alyes as it drifted down the to its current location. They also had the privilege to visit it a second time, nearly a week before we did. It's unfortunate that we did not cross paths.

Eric McNair-Landry