High summer temperatures caused record melting of the Norwegian archipelago’s glaciers.
Summer 2024 saw Svalbard’s ice caps melt at record levels, driven by high air temperatures and further exacerbated by a persistent heat dome over Scandinavia. This led to historical temperature highs and significant ice loss, alarming climatologists and environmentalists alike.
Extreme Melting in Svalbard
The Svalbard archipelago’s ice caps suffered extreme episodes of melting in the summer of 2024, brought on by exceptionally high air temperatures.
Situated between mainland Norway and the North Pole, Svalbard is one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. Over half of its land area is covered with ice, composing about 6 percent of the planet’s glaciated area outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
Record Temperatures and Rapid Ice Loss
In late July and early August 2024, temperatures hovered around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) above average for this part of the Arctic Circle. The heat took its toll on Svalbard, home to some of Earth’s northernmost glaciers, causing snow and ice to rapidly melt.
Climatic Records Shattered
The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured these images of Nordaustlandet—the second largest island in the archipelago—on August 9 as water and sediment drained off the coast and into the Arctic Ocean. Sediment is likely causing the striking swirls of color in the water surrounding the island. The melting of seasonal snow and an older, compressed layer of snow called “firn,” left some areas of glacial ice (light blue) bare and exposed in the images.
According to Xavier Fettweis, a climatologist at the University of Liège, Svalbard’s ice caps broke their all-time record for daily surface melt on July 23, 2024. Svalbard shed about 55 millimeters of water equivalent that day, a rate five times larger than normal.
The exceptional melting continued into August, corresponding with a persistent heat dome that baked parts of Scandinavia’s Arctic. In Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s capital on the main island of Spitsbergen, temperatures reached 20.2°C (68°F) on August 11, its highest August temperature on record and about 2.2°C (4°F) above the previous monthly record, according to meteorologist Daan van den Broek.
Unprecedented Summer Heat
Svalbard experienced its warmest summer on record in 2023, according to the Copernicus State of the Climate report. The report cited several contributing factors for the warmth, including below-average sea ice cover and above-average sea surface temperatures.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
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49 Comments
Why is this an indictment of climate change, rather than the causes? It’s like we measure well observations but fail in documenting causes.
How in the World is this a “CRISIS”!!!!
A completely ridiculous article meant to uselessly alarm tiny, tiny minds. How many years have there been records of this tiny scrap of lifeless rock? What will happen to it this coming winter? It will be completely buried in snow again.
What if the new hypothesis of recent warming that implicates Clouroflourocarbons and shows almost zero influence from CO2?
Idiocy propagated by the Left as part if their war against Capitalism and in favor of the greatest failure of am idea in history Communism- Maxism-Socialism!. 100 million dead and they still more!
Tiny, tiny mind is not capable of recognising a warming trend and extrapolating it’s consequences.
For tiny tiny mind, only solution is to burry head into sand, and hope for the best.
Capitalism has answer to all, and there is already new planet B waiting to be trashed…
Did you not know. The tickets to Mars are sellng out quick. I think its mostly to NewYokers,Californians, And good ole Florida people.Lol
.. Blame CORPORATISM – NOT Capitalism – for ClimateChange and other criminally-ignored curses of the last seven (7) decades
… Ever since the 1952 Patent Act, a fascistic anti-democratic Corporatism has been allowed to steal or suppress our individual citizens Creativity. That cunning legislation surreptitiously destroyed the ONLY “exclusive” protection for anyone that OurFounders had intended in the U.S. Constitution. They understood the treachery and intimidation of faceless and powerful entities like monopolies, royalty, and other types of Bullies against the vulnerable Work of individuals .
These tiny islands might be insignificant but there are paying the price due to the carbon emissions from the rest of the world which sits safely 1000’s of miles away. For us countries who have millions of spare miles at our disposal, changes in the environment might not impact our livelihood but for these tiny countries when a few 100 miles is a third of their entire space the gravity of the situation is more profound. You may or may not agree, but nature is changing. For those near the coast, move inwards by at least a 100 kms if you want your grand kids to survive. By 2030 all coastal habitats will get a taste of what is going to happen by 2040.
Not that I’m a raving commie or an extremist at all but truth is truth. How many deaths and displacements has a more extreme version of capitalism in neoliberalism been responsible for in the last 40 years? It is absolutely responsible for the re-emergence of fascism and associated leaders across the developed World. It is capitalism that was responsible for Iraq and the destabilisation of parts of the ME which Europe & UK are now paying for. The list goes on and on. Capitalism is a lot of things but innocent & guilt free when it comes to death and misery it is not.
Well said🇺🇸
“… and the destabilisation of parts of the ME which Europe & UK are now paying for …”
And colonialism and WWII played no part in that?
An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.
Wow, fitting last name!
Wow you might as well claim the earth is flat. The level of denial and ignorance in your statement is astounding
No mention of the impact on the seed banks stored on svalbard because it was supposed to stay cold forever?! Oops
People who use the word left which is a term to keep people divided is the one has the tiny mind…. global warming is real..air pollution is real, light pollution is real, earthquakes are real, tsunamis are real, crater impacts are real, dinosaurs are real.. science is real. Melting ice might not seem important to you but it’s very very real and someday a lot of land mass will be underwater that very is real.
Hmm and there was me believing CFCs have been globally banned since the 80s and rapidly reducing in the atmosphere.
Dont forget how important that little rock really is .. the worlds only non gmo seed stock is there in case of a climate or man-made disaster . A lot of money has been put into that hidden in plain sight program
I’ll break it down for the slow people in the class. No ice and hotter planet = bad for humans. I won’t bother with the science you obviously don’t understand.
Humans, the hairless apes of the savanna with more sweat glands than any other mammal, that can run down any other animal in a marathon, and can survive naked in the tropics. You leave me wondering just who the “slow people in the class” are.
The arrogance is strong in most of the commenters here.
What are these “ice caps” that are being mentioned? The term is usually used for extensive ice at the poles, such as Antarctica and the Arctic region.
How does one convert the ‘anomalies’ for Svalbard to actual temperatures without a baseline? It appears that for Svalbard the temperature anomalies only briefly (a few days in late -July and several days in early-August ) and barely (a couple degrees) exceed the 1980-2023 maximum values. Because all the other Spring-Summer temperatures are below the historical highs, how does one distinguish weather from change?
It’s not about information, Clyde. It’s propaganda. You’re not supposed to think about it- just be enraged! Triggered! Incoherently angry! Shaje your fist at the heavens and curse the large corporations that have doomed us all to struggle forward with less ice on Svalbard! How will we cope?
I’m so surprised that a denier doesn’t even know what an ice cap is. How shocking that they are completely ignorant of what words mean even though Wikipedia and Google are free. This is my shocked face. 😐
The usual nonsense climate alarmist article. It’s summer, this is when ice tends to melt more readily. And, of course the claims of ‘record melting’ can usually be dispelled by looking back a few decades in the climate records!
Funny how they never give you all the facts, only the hyped up over magnified image of how they want you to see it. Never an overview of the whole area, so the true scale can be seen in comparison to the entire Arctic circle and beyond.
Complete hysterical eco-nazi liberal lefty nonsense.
Wow. Speaking as a scientist these comments are terrifying. We must continue to try and educate.. ID
Educate what? Your climate theories and models are full of holes.
I am no psycologist but you sound like the proverbial dunning-krueger case book example: “I know nothing about this subject but I know you very wrong”.
Clearly you’re no psychologist, so don’t embarrass yourself using terms that you don’t know anything about.
And you’re also clearly an idiot. Because, instead of asking me about the holes I mentioned, you went straight after me in a juvenile “ad hominem” attack. Once you choose that route, there’s no talking to you any more, because you’re not worthy of a discussion.
You come across as an example of what you are railing against!
Your head is full of holes read the facts not the hope from the republicans obviously you are a trumpet someone that refuses to see the truth and believes in falsehoods I bet you believe the earth is flat as well you know being a Republican used to mean something now a Republican doesn’t mean anything but spouting lies and conspiracy theories didn’t you learn anything from your mothers and fathers you should be ashamed of yourselves stand up for the truth all of our scientists can not be wrong all of them agree that global warming is real and caused by us
Firstly, I despise Trump and the GOP. They’re corporate bitches just like Harris and the Dems. But your tiny partisan brain cannot think outside of that box.
Secondly, there’s no consensus – neither on the direction the climate is heading, nor the main driving forces behind the trend. So, it’s not “all scientists”. Not even “all climatologists”. Even if there were a consensus, it wouldn’t be a scientific proof. Science is not a democratic process where you vote.
But I’m talking to a buffoon. You cannot even spell “climatology”. Your level of discourse shows that you’re not a bright person, but that makes you a perfect parrot for the mainstream propaganda.
Happy parroting, chum!
WILLIAM:
I agree, but you need to use periods.
There is an old saying that, when you point a finger at someone, there are three fingers point back at yourself. Dragging politics into a discussion about science demonstrates that you support the idea of “lies and conspiracy theories.”
Claiming that “ALL of our scientists can not be wrong ALL of them agree that global warming is real and caused by us” demonstrates that you have been propagandized and don’t understand the issue.
Your pious declarations don’t establish that something is ‘Truth.’
Looks like feeding time for the seals, whales and bears! Before the winter brings back all the ice and snow.
Perhaps if these lefty loons went to work and got off their computers and stopped driving their diesel camper vans all over the countryside the ice woukd be a lot cleaner then they can all Go live there together in their Nazi Commie Utopia.
At least those folks stuck on Svalbard can finally enjoy summer for a bit.
That’s what people in Saudi Arabia comment about record high temps in Liberian peninsula, over 40s C: now we can finally start to enjoy summer for a bit. We’ll I hate it.
Giant weather balloon to block the sun from melting the ice.
John Hemsworth author of that ill informed comment must be part of this Trumpian collection of climate den iers so frightened by the reality of a situation that could have been avoided had oil companies and other interested parties not turned a clearly understood problem in the late 80’s into a political debate that made governments veer disastrously away from energy transition. The problem I’d that the basic physics and chemistry has been established for over Two Hundred years, you cannot alter the fact that light radiation acts on trace gasses with the conversion to infrared when it reaches the planets surface. He needs to study how the escalation of C02 from volcanic and seismic events led to Earth’s temperature rising Eight times it’s current level during the Permian extinction!
Andrew, you don’t understand the problem. The issue isn’t about whether or not CO2 has an absorption feature in the IR, but rather, what the net quantitative result is in a dynamic system with numerous feedback loops. Additionally, there are probably feedback loops we are unaware of.
The Earth’s global average temperature is currently about 14.4 deg C. Surely you aren’t suggesting that the temperature during the End-Permian was 115 deg C (8×14.4), well above the boiling point of water! Perhaps you are just confused by all the ‘sciencey’ words you have read. Infrared radiation is NOT light. It is an electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than light, which is visible, just as radio-waves have a wavelength longer than IR.
I find it unbelievably arrogant for you tell someone they need to “study” something when your writing shows that you don’t understand the very same things.
Actually, Infared IS light. Just not in a wavelength humans can see.
We only see a small spectrum of the light wavelengths.
Look up the definition of “Light” in Wikipedia. People often carelessly call EM radiation that can’t be seen, “light.” However, this is a science website and I think that the scientific definition should be adhered to — Electromagnetic radiation in the part of the EM spectrum that can be seen by humans. The other regions of the EM spectrum have other names.
I can’t imagine +20C on a Svalbard. Must be cool to have some hiking over there.
What never fails to amaze and alarm me is the knee-jerk reactionary stupidity of some people when Anthropogenic Global Heating is being discussed.
What never fails to amaze me is that the people whose’ comments suggest that they know little about science or the Scientific Method, let alone climatology, are adamant that they know the Truth and it gives them license to insult those they disagree with. Some have even gone so far as to accuse those they disagree with as suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect, when I find it more likely that they are just projecting. After all, more than one living Nobel Laureate is a skeptic of the Anthropogenic Global Heating meme. And his (John Clauser) Nobel Prize was in the field relating to radiative forcing.
this is the end.
The Earth has been through a LOT worse than this and turned out fine. There have been many periods in Earths 4.6 billion year existence where there was no ice at all, and periods where ice covered nearly the whole planet. And with the Sun going through an extreme cycle right now, it’s no wonder why things are so loopy right now.
Stop it with the “climate crisis” garbage. Stop scaring people knowing full well there is nothing we can do to stop nature from doing what it does. Our ancestors were able to survive, adapt and eventually thrive after extreme climate changes. Just stop it with the doomsday rhetoric.
This is actually good news. More water introduced into the hydrological cycle and more land to live on and more food crops that will thrive with longer growing seasons and more CO 2 to feed them. Which will also produce more oxygen that we breath. . More water means more precipitation which means more evaporation which has a coming effect. The earth’s climate will balance itself out. The pessimistic, negative and doomsday people need to understand this.
You really are a mindless troglodyte aren’t you? The mass of high quality scientific data supporting the premise in this article is so vast, so immense, and so irrefutable that the timescales over which that data has been gathered pales into insignificance.
I love how your childlike understanding of local snowfall s the benchmark by which you measure the global climate system, hilarious!
The sheer monolithic breadth of the self-delusion that you and your ilk rely on to deny the reality that confronts you is and enditement upon the potential for survival of the human race itself. Wake up and snap out of your fantasy before it’s too late.
I don’t see anything in your comment to convince anyone that your moniker of “SamScience” is even close to accurate. It is understandable that you might feel your only recourse to someone you disagree with is to insult them. However, you have crossed the line when you similarly attack those you characterize as “your ilk.” You are basically claiming that you can read people’s minds and know what motivates them and what knowledge they have. I would call that a good example of “self-delusion.”
You really are a mindless troglodyte aren’t you? The mass of high quality scientific data supporting the premise in this article is so vast, so immense, and so irrefutable that the timescales over which that data has been gathered pales into insignificance.
I love how your childlike understanding of local snowfall s the benchmark by which you measure the global climate system, hilarious!
The sheer monolithic breadth of the self-delusion that you and your ilk rely on to deny the reality that confronts you is and enditement upon the potential for survival of the human race itself. Wake up and snap out of your fantasy before it’s too late.
(Replying to John Harmsworth’s post on August 17, 2024 7:49 pm)