Queen Elizabeth Islands the four ice caps that the federal government's NRCan's Climate Change Geoscience Program Earth Sciences Sector (ESS), monitors onsite in the Canadian High Arctic, three are in the Queen Elizabeth Islands: Devon, Meighen and Melville. In a memo to Earth Sciences Sector (ESS) in Canada's High Arctic indicates that shrinking of ice caps started in the late 1980s, and has accelerated rapidly since 2005," says an October 2013 memo to NRCan's deputy minister, who reports to federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. The increased melt rate was confirmed by University of California, Irvine in 2017. Computer analysis of a glacier
HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) second period of sea trials, she was accompanied by the Type 45 destroyer . "Queen Elizabeth" returned to Portsmouth on 21 November 2017 to prepare for her official commissioning ceremony, which was held on 7 December 2017. Following the ship's commissioning, she underwent a period of defect correction in Portsmouth; one instance was a leak through a seal in one of the propeller shafts, which the Royal Navy stated was not serious enough to keep "Queen Elizabeth" from her planned programme. On 2 February 2018, "Queen Elizabeth" sailed from Portsmouth for a second time, for a six-week deployment to undergo