Ocean Color Image Gallery

A Hot Canadian Summer

The Foxe Basin, situated to the North of the 65th parallel in Canada, is covered by ice for most of the year and usually contains ice until September.

This year, however, Earth experienced the hottest summer since we started recording global temperatures in 1880. Hot temperatures caused an early ice melt over the arctic, prematurely exposing the sediment-rich waters of the Foxe Basin, which is home to polar bears and the largest walrus herd in Canada.

This year is also amongst the six worst years in the last 50 in Canada for wildfires, and a thick smoke plume coming from fires raging in multiple provinces and territories is visible in this image and affecting a large part of the North of the country.

This image was taken by the OCI sensor aboard PACE on August 11, 2024.