The glaciers of Svalbard, the Arctic islands north of Norway, just went through their worst summer on record. A new study says the 2024 melt season was unlike anything seen before — and it could be a preview of how quickly other ice sheets, including Greenland’s, might unravel.
Glaciologists have tracked unusually warm summers before, in 2020 and 2022, but last year’s melt “was in a different league,” said Thomas Vikhamar Schuler, a geosciences professor at the University of Oslo who led the research. The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show Svalbard became a major contributor to global sea-level rise in just a few weeks.
Most of the damage happened over the course of six sweltering weeks. Temperatures surged, driven by stubborn wind and pressure patterns that scientists increasingly link to human-caused climate change. “We often talk about these impacts as something our grandchildren will face,” Schuler said. “But this is happening in our own lifetimes.”
For many researchers, the numbers confirmed what the images from last summer had already suggested. “I think a lot of glaciologists felt uneasy when they saw the photographs coming out of Svalbard,” said James Kirkham of the British Antarctic Survey, who was not part of the study. “The official figures are truly alarming.”
The consequences of such rapid ice loss go far beyond Svalbard. Glaciers shrinking at this rate raise the risk of floods in mountain regions, then water scarcity later on as rivers fed by ice run dry. The sudden surge of freshwater into the Barents Sea may also have unsettled marine ecosystems. Plankton, the tiny organisms that form the base of the food web, are sensitive to changes in salinity and temperature. If their cycles are disrupted, so too are the seabirds and marine mammals that depend on them.
Scientists also worry about bigger ripple effects. Fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic could slow the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a vast system of currents that keeps Europe’s climate relatively mild. “Even under the most optimistic climate scenarios, the outlook for Svalbard’s ice is bleak,” Schuler warned. “Zero emissions by 2050 still won’t prevent many summers like the one we just lived through.”