In the Eva-Liv Island area of the Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic, an ice formation, Mesyatsev Island, has disappeared. This is stated in the message from the RGO (Russian Geographic Society).
According to satellite images, Mesyatseva Island was formed on the peninsula of the same name as a result of the melting of the glacier on Eva-Liv Island before 1995.
“We followed it from 2020 to 2022. Now the island has completely melted, requiring a correction of the navigation maps.” — said Alexey Kucheiko, associate professor of the Moscow Aviation Institute and candidate of technical sciences. The island was monitored by the interregional RISKSAT project group, which he headed.
Initially, the island was Cape Mesyatsev, but gradually its area shrank and in the summer of 2021 its surface changed color from the usual white to dark.
As of August 19, 2015, the area of Mesyatsev Island was approximately 53 hectares; On August 12, 2024, a small ice island measuring 3 hectares was recorded in the image. Another month later, on September 13, 2024, the island finally disappeared from the photographs.
“We discovered the disappearance of the island during the practical task “Calculation of changes in areas using a pair of satellite images at different times”, the aim of which was to study the consequences of climate change in the Arctic zone of Russia in the past. years,” – explained the students of the Institute No. 6 “Aerospace” of the MAI.
Explaining the reasons for the island’s disappearance, the RISKSAT group proposed a hypothesis according to which, in the Arctic regions, climate warming causes glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise. This causes the erosion of the coastline and, as a consequence, the disappearance of some geographical features.
In the future, additional research will be necessary to finally confirm the disappearance of Mesyatsev Island and identify possible changes in the topography of the seabed.
