Image courtesy of Xinhua/Shutterstock
Joel Kontinen
Global warming
has struck Svalbard. During the summer of 2024, a record number of ice melted
on Svalbard.
During the summer of 2024, six weeks of record-smashing heat
led to a record-obliterating amount of ice melting on the islands of Svalbard
in the Arctic. By the end of the summer, 1 per melted on cent of all the land ice on the
archipelago had been lost – enough to raise the global average sea level by
0.16 millimetres.
“It was very shocking,” says Thomas
Schuler at the University of Oslo in Norway. “It was not just elted a
marginal record. The melt was almost twice as high as in the previous record.”
More than half of Svalbard is covered
in ice. Winter snowfall adds to the ice, while the
flow of glaciers into the sea and surface melting during summer leads
to ice loss.
Schuler’s team has been using a combination of on-site
measurements, satellite data and computer modelling to estimate how the total
mass of ice on the archipelago is changing.
Since 1991, less than 10 gigatonnes of ice has melted during
each summer, on average. But four of the past five years have set new records
for summer ice loss. Altogether, the team estimates that around 62 gigatonnes
of ice were lost last summer, almost entirely due to surface melting rather
than ice flow into the sea.
By Michael Le Page 2025 Unprecedented Arctic heatwave melted 1 per cent of Svalbard's ice | New Scientist 18 August
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