Two Canadian ice caps have completely vanished from the Arctic, NASA imagery shows - Live Science

Scientists gave the caps 5 years to live in a 2017 study.

Climate change killed them in record time.

Like many glacial features in the Arctic — which is warming at roughly twice the rate of the rest of the world — the caps were killed by climate change.

Ice caps are a type of glacier that cover less than 19,300 square miles (50,000 square kilometers) of land on Earth, according to the NSIDC.

Patrick Bay ice caps sat about 2,600 feet (800 meters) above Ellesmere Island's Hazen Plateau in Nunavut, Canada, where they existed for hundreds of years.

Researchers aren't sure how large the caps were at their maximum extent, but when a team investigated in 1959 the caps covered about 3 square miles (7.5 square km) and 1.2 square miles (3 square km), respectively.

Serreze, the lead author of the 2017 study, published in the journal The Cryosphere, predicted that the caps would vanish completely within five years.

"We've long known that as climate change takes hold, the effects would be especially pronounced in the Arctic," Serreze said.

"But the death of those two little caps that I once knew so well has made climate change very personal.