Penny Ice Cap is the southernmost of Canada’s big ice caps. Like other glaciers and ice caps in the Northern Hemisphere, the Penny has been thinning and its valley glaciers have been retreating in recent decades.
In 1984, there were 1.86 million square kilometers of old ice spread across the Arctic at its yearly minimum extent. In September 2016, there were only 110,000 square kilometers of old ice left.
Perched high in the Andes, Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap stores centuries of climate change history in its ice. Its melting edges tell a more immediate climate story.