Researchers Unravel Decades-Old Mystery Behind ‘Ghost Islands’ That Showed up in the Arctic Ocean
An expedition team of Danish, Swiss, and Greenlandic researchers visited northern Greenland to collect some samples in 2021. They arrived at an island that measured 98 feet by 197 feet and rose 10 to 13 feet above sea level. Carpeted with gravel, silt, pebbles, and rock debris, the icy island fascinated them. They believed that they had reached Oodaaq, an island that was discovered in 1978 by a Danish survey team. Little did they know that they were at the forefront of encountering an intriguing Arctic mystery.
While the team thought that they were in Oodaaq, they were instead 2,560 feet north of Oodaaq. Turns out it was just a glitch in their GPS sensors. Back in the laboratory, when they pored through the island’s aerial imagery, their jaws dropped open. They realized that they were not on Oodaaq and or even on any familiar island. Upon much contemplation, they named this uncharted icy landscape “Qeqertaq Avannarleq,” Greenlandic for “the northernmost island,” Kevin Hamilton from the University of Hawaii, told The Conversation.
Further research revealed that about 1.2 miles north of the Greenland mainland, there’s a cluster of mysterious islands, including this one, that keep on appearing and disappearing. “Ghost Island,” they call these. "These small islands come and go," commented a geodynamic expert, per The Smithsonian. "Together with DTU, we realized that my GPS had erred, leading us to believe that we were on Oodaaq. In fact, we had just discovered a new island further north, a discovery that ever so slightly expands the Kingdom," Morten Rasch, a geomorphologist and expedition leader, said in a press release. “It was not our intention to discover a new island,” Rasch said to The Guardian. “We just went there to collect samples.”
There were no plants or animals on the island, but the researchers collected soil samples hoping that there was a possibility of finding microscopic life or bacteria in the soil, reported Gizmodo. However, the island appeared to mimic every attribute that a typical island depicts. For decades, researchers believed that gushing winds of the north pushed sea ice from the Arctic Ocean towards Greenland where ice forced sediments from the sea to rise from the seabed, which gave birth to these islands, said Rene Forsberg, from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). But that didn’t turn out to be the case.
Arctic Today explains that the “ghost islands” are most likely to be icebergs in disguise that were once broken off from a glacier, somewhere in the west of Greenland’s northernmost point, Kap Morris Jesup, where these ghostly apparitions occur. After getting calved off by the glacier, these landmasses drifted eastward, carrying hoards of gravel and sediment. Arriving into this patch of the Arctic, the sediment was pushed upwards by the sea ice. Now, the “ghost island,” a.k.a. iceberg sits firmly at the bottom of the ice.
But it could break away from the sea at any given point in time. "No one knows how long it will remain. In principle, it could disappear as soon as a powerful new storm hits," Rasch said in the press release. Quite sad that the “ghost island” couldn’t hold the title of being the “northernmost island on Earth” for a long time, but as a result, this title is still held by Kaffeklubben Ø or Coffee Club Island.