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Milne Ice Shelf Collapse Replaced Freshwater Lake Ecosystem
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Story summary
- The Milne Ice Shelf collapse in July 2020 drained Canada’s only remaining epishelf lake into the Arctic Ocean.
- By autumn 2020 the lake and its unique ecosystem had mostly vanished.
- July 2022 field work found brackish water fully replaced the 18-metre-deep freshwater layer.
- Researchers reported fresh and salt layers only 20 cm apart hosted virtually no overlapping microbes, indicating a one-way regime shift.