De Long Islands

Factual Questions
1

I’ve recently exhausted a number of books on Polar exploration. Almost all these books have a handy map of the Arctic Ocean with a dotted line that shows the extent of the permanent ice cap. As far as I can tell, the only pieces of permanently ice locked land are the De Long Islands (named for an American who had the good fortune to die there) off the north shore of Siberia.

My understanding is that the ice cap is always moving, actually rotating, within the basin created by the north coasts of Eurasia, North America and Greenland. If this is so, how come these islands haven’t been obliterated by the constant ice shift? Shouldn’t thousands of years of abrasion have shaved off the above water portion of any land within the permanent ice cap?

2

PB, you don’t remember the continent of de Long? :wink:

Strictly WAG, but the pack ice is not as dense or heavy as a glacier, so that some obstructions are possible. The ocean in that area is not paricularly deep, so they could be new islands. We really don’t know how large the Ostrova de Longa were originally, nor when they were originally upthrust from the ocean floor. You could be exactly right about their fate, but we may just not yet have seen it occur. I can find no evidence that they are volcanic, but there are other ways for the earth to create mountains (islands).

Tom~