Cañon Fiord’s Whirling Waters – NASA Science

For most of the year, ice covers the northern waterways of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. But during the brief summer melt season, the stark white and gray landscape transforms into a colorful and vibrant environment. On a particularly striking day in 2022, plumes of sediment and fractured sea ice traced eddies in a branch of the Nansen Sound fjord system.

These satellite images show a section of Cañon Fjord, located approximately 115 kilometers (70 miles) southeast of the Eureka Research Station on west-central Ellesmere Island. The waters of 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 University of Manitoba’s Center for Earth Observing Sciences, has studied eddies in the fjord system and notes that the water’s turbidity, a measure of its cloudiness, remains low during the ice-cover season. Freshwater runoff—and the sediment it carries—decreases sharply at this time of year, and the formation of 2-meter-thick sea ice protects the surface from the wind, removing the 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 icebergs that broke off from nearby outlet glaciers. The second detailed image shows a similar scenario; however, in this case, it is the sediment suspended in the water that traces the flow.

Alex Gardner and Chad Greene, glaciologists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, pointed out that the sediment plume is mostly glacial flour, a rock pulverized by a glacier. Surface meltwater that penetrates beneath the glacier eventually flushes the glacial flour into the fjord, giving the water a turquoise appearance. Glacial meal is an essential source of nutrients, particularly iron. Soluble iron is an essential nutrient in marine ecosystems because most phytoplankton, the foundation of marine food webs, depend on it to grow.

The glacial ice visible in these scenes comes from the Agassiz Ice Cap, one of five major ice caps on Ellesmere Island. Using data from NASA’s ICESat and DLR-NASA GRACE missions, scientists showed that glaciers in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago began shrinking rapidly in the mid-2000s and that this trend persists.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from United States Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

• Dmitrenko, IA, et al. (2025) Following a half-century oceanographic data gap in the northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago: multidecadal variability in Pacific water flow. Frontiers of Marine Science12, 1602485.
• Gardner, A.S. et al. (2011) Sharp increase in mass loss from glaciers and ice sheets in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Nature473, 357-360.
• Wouters, B., et al. (2019) Global glacier mass loss during the GRACE satellite mission (2002-2016). Frontiers in Earth Sciences7, 96.