On the northern edge of Ellesmere Island, in a place whose Inuktitut name means 'the place where the ice never melts,' a freshwater lake that had endured for thousands of years vanished within months after the Milne Ice Shelf collapsed in July 2020. Canada's last epishelf lake — a rare ecological wonder where freshwater and marine worlds coexisted in layered silence — drained permanently into the Arctic Ocean, and a decade of multinational research now confirms it cannot return. The loss is not merely of a body of water, but of a living archive of geological time, erased on a human timescale b