The birth of an ice island is rarely seen. But what begins in remote high Arctic latitudes can, in the years and decades that follow, have a real impact on places that are far more visible, like shipping lanes and offshore oil platforms.

Recent years have produced a wave of ice islands. Researchers tracking the giant formations have tabulated roughly 1,000 square kilometres that have broken free from Greenland and Canadas Arctic islands. At a time when new research suggests the Greenland ice sheet is melting five times faster than in the 1990s and roughly a quarter of that is in the form of icebergs, according to the Swiss Federal Research Institute a frozen area the size of Hong Kong is wandering south, breaking into hundreds and thousands of smaller bits, some too small to be seen by ship radar, as they drift.

That volume of ice stands to present hazards to marine industries along Canadas northern and eastern coasts for years to come, researchers are now warning. Ice islands, especially if they stay in northern latitudes, can last for decades as they slowly splinter apart, so the potential for problems is a lengthy one.

Roughly half the volume has come from the coast of Ellesmere Island, at the top of the Arctic archipelago.

These are ice islands that are drifting to the west, and will be of concern for any infrastructure or shipping in the western Arctic, said Derek Mueller, an assistant professor in the department of geography and environmental studies at Carleton University, who studies icy regions. He referred specifically to revived offshore drilling in Alaska and to rising, albeit still minimal, levels of traffic through the Northwest Passage.

The Greenland ice is headed into better-travelled transatlantic shipping lanes. A large section of one ice island has already found its way near the Strait of Belle Isle, between Labrador and Newfoundland, a shortcut used by vessels crossing between northern Europe and the St. Lawrence.

If they break up into smaller pieces and you get bergy bits and growlers concrete-hard chunks the size of houses and cars, some of which can be submerged in heavy wave conditions, making them difficult to spot theyre impossible to track at that scale, Mr. Mueller said. So any one of those pieces of ice could potentially be a hazard to shipping.

Some of that risk can be avoided by mapping the trajectory of ice islands, a task that has become part of Mr. Muellers research. He has worked with Transport Canada and the Canadian Ice Service to predict where the ice islands will go and how they will deteriorate modelling the path of danger. He and several other researchers will present an update of their findings to an Arctic research gathering in Vancouver next week.

The concern about ice islands must be weighed against the tremendous gains that have been made in ice detection in recent years and decades. The ice services of the Canadian and U.S. Coast Guards produce regular ice maps that are widely available to ship captains. Companies engaged in oil exploration pay close attention to icebergs, using satellite data and spotter planes to track their movements and employing ships to tug them away if they near production platforms.

Those ships, however, cant redirect a large fragment of an ice island, although for the most part these ice islands are breaking up into small enough fragments that by the time they get south, theyre manageable, said Tony King, director of geotechnical engineering with C-CORE, a St. Johns firm that does ice engineering work.

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Marine industries beware: Ice islands dead ahead