Svalbard lost 1% of his ice in the summer of 2024, more than any year recorded

Svalbard, an arctic archipelago which technically makes part of Norway, is located halfway between the northern part of Norway and the North Pole. Currently, around 60% of the Svalbard surface is covered with glaciers, but these glaciers melt quickly. During the summer of 2024, Svalbard experienced a record heat wave that melted more from his glaciers than ever.

The impact of this type of event is not limited to the local region, but has a great-reaching consequences and can act as a future sign to come. Massive Glacier Felts contribute to the world elevation of sea level and the impact of ocean circulation, marine ecosystems and local communities. It is essential to determine the loss of ice mass and place it in a historical and future climate context to understand these impacts.

Consequently, Thomas Vikhamar Schuler, a researcher from the University of Oslo in Norway, and his team undertook to quantify the impact of the heat wave of six weeks of 2024. To do this, they used in situ glacier measurements from aluminum posts fixed in ice markers to record the modeling of the surface of the prage. They determined the loss of mass both by surface melting and the calving of ice – when pieces of ice break the glaciers and fall into the ocean – at marine glacier fronts.

The document is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team noted that Svalbard lost around 1% of its total ice mass, which amounts to 61.7 ± 11.1 ice gigatons in the summer of 2024. Although it is 50 times smaller than Greenland, the quantity of ice lost in Svalbard is equally with the loss of ice from Greenland of 55 ± 35 gigabilions. The majority of this merger occurred during a six -week period. Even past models predicted this amplitude of the loss of ice until much later.

The Circon-Busints region, which includes Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, lost a total of 102.1 ± 22.9 ice gigatons in 2024. This is equivalent to a contribution of 0.27 ± 0.06 mm to a global increase in sea level. This may not seem much, but the authors of the study explain that this contribution sea level of all the arctic glaciers estimated for 2006-2015, placing the surrounding region among the strongest contributors to the rise in world sea level in 2024.

The team also carried out climate modeling based on its results, which predicted that these types of extreme summers will become currents in 2100, even in optimistic emission scenarios.

“Our study shows that the summer temperatures of 2024 will be frequently reached in a few decades and exceeded towards the end of the 21st century. The summer of 2024 on Svalbard thus provided a window on the fusion of the Arctic glacier in the warmer future, highlighting the serious massive loss of glaciers and its repercussions in other regions of the Arctic beyond Svalbard”, the authors of the study write.

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