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An ice cap is a mass of glacial ice that covers less than 50,000 km 2 (19,000 sq mi) of land area covering a highland area and they feed outlet glaciers. [4]: 52 Many Icelandic ice caps and glaciers lie above volcanoes, such as Grímsvötn and Bárðarbunga, which lie under the largest ice cap, Vatnajökull.
The ice cap was mapped during the 1952–54 British North Greenland expedition led by Commander James Simpson. It was named in honor of the Royal Air Force in order to commemorate the air transport supplied to the expedition. The name "Adastra Ice Cap" had been suggested by Brian Roberts, but finally "Ad Astra Ice Cap" became the approved name. [2]
Ice caps accumulate snow on their upper surfaces, and ablate snow on their lower surfaces. [6] An ice cap in equilibrium accumulates and ablates snow at the same rate. The AAR is the ratio between the accumulation area and the total area of the ice cap, which is used to indicate the health of the glacier. [6]
An ice cap climate is a polar climate where no mean monthly temperature exceeds 0 °C (32 °F). The climate generally covers areas at high altitudes and polar regions (60–90° north and south latitude), such as Antarctica and some of the northernmost islands of Canada and Russia .
Austfonna is an ice cap located on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. Covering an area of 7,800 km 2, [1] it is Europe's third-largest glacier by area and volume, after the Severny Island ice cap of Novaya Zemlya, Russia, and Vatnajökull in Iceland. [2] The combined area of Austfonna and the Vegafonna ice cap is 8,492 km 2. [3]
Glaciers often form on the edges of ice fields, serving as gravity-propelled drains off the ice field which is in turn replenished by snowfall. While an ice cap is not constrained by topography, an ice field is. An ice field is also distinguishable from an ice cap because it does not have a dome-like form. [2]
The ice cap is located south of Amundsen Land and the Nordpasset, at the western end of the De Long Fjord area, east of Freuchen Land across the inner J.P. Koch Fjord, west of Odin Fjord and south of the O.B. Bøggild Fjord. [9]
The Agassiz Ice Cap formerly Agassiz Glacier [1] is an ice cap on the central eastern side of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada. [2] The Agassiz ice cap is about 21,000 km 2 (8,100 sq mi) in area. [2] It is located between the North Ellesmere ice field to the north and the Prince of Wales Icefield to the south.