Svalbard lost “Record-breaking” ice in 2024

 In 2024, Svalbard lost “Record-breaking” ice, more than any year on record

Glaciers in Arctic Svalbard experienced unprecedented melting during summer 2024, contributing to global sea-level rise. New research shows the summer of 2024 was a “record-breaking” melt season in Svalbard, raising concerns about the scale of future glacial ice melts under climate change. Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago which is technically a part of Norway, lies about halfway between the northernmost part of Norway and the North Pole. Currently, about 60% of Svalbard's surface is covered in glaciers, but these glaciers are melting rapidly. During the summer of 2024, Svalbard experienced a record-breaking heat wave which melted more of its glaciers than ever before.

The team was made up of a collaboration of scientists including researchers from the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. The loss of glacial ice in the Norwegian archipelago is predicted to have significant impacts on the local and global environment possibly leading to rising sea levels and impacting the ocean currents. Svalbard experienced extraordinarily high temperatures last summer. The researchers found that the sea surface temperatures of the surrounding areas in the Barents and Norwegian Seas were 3.5 to 5°C above the 1991–2020 baseline. The impact of these kinds of events is not limited to the local region, but has far-reaching consequences and can act as a harbinger of things to come. Massive glacier melts contribute to global sea-level rise and impact ocean circulation, marine ecosystems and local communities. Determining glacial mass loss and placing it in a historical and future climate context is essential for understanding these impacts.

“Combining in situ observations, remote sensing, and modelling, we quantify the mass loss of all glaciers on Svalbard during the record-warm summer of 2024, that by far exceeds previous levels,” write the researchers. “The summer of 2024 on Svalbard thus provided a window into Arctic glacier meltdown in a warmer future.” The analysis shows that the summer glacial melt in Svalbard in 2024 resulted in around 61.7 gigatons of ice melting. This is 1% of Svalbard total ice mass. This loss contributed to approximately 0.16mm of water to global sea level rise although, when considering the melting of nearby areas too, this figure jumps to 0.27mm. Thomas Vikhamar Schuler, a researcher from the University of Oslo in Norway, and his team set out to quantify the impact of the six-week heat wave of the summer of 2024. To do this, they utilized in situ glacier measurements from aluminium poles fixed in the ice as reference markers to record changes in the glacier's surface, remote sensing data from satellites and climate modelling using the CryoGrid model. They determined mass loss through both surface melt and ice calving, when chunks of ice break off glaciers and fall into the ocean, at marine glacier fronts.

“Affecting global sea-level rise, mass loss from Arctic glaciers has implications far beyond their geographical location,” write the authors. “By injecting buoyant freshwater, meltwater runoff from land to the ocean has far-reaching implications for ocean circulation near shore and in fjords and fuels a variety of ecological communities across a wide range of the food chain.” Svalbard is home to 6% of the world’s glacier area outside of Greenland and Antarctica. If the all the glaciers on Svalbard were to melt, scientists predict this would account for a 1.7cm sea level rise. Despite being 50 times smaller than Greenland, the amount of ice lost in Svalbard is on par with Greenland's ice loss of 55 ± 35 gigatons. Most of this melting occurred during a six-week period. Even past models did not predict this magnitude of ice loss until much later. The region of circum-Barents, which includes Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, lost a total of 102.1 ± 22.9 gigatons of ice in 2024. This amounts to a contribution of 0.27 ± 0.06 mm to global sea-level rise. That may not sound like much, but the study authors explain that this contribution corresponds to half of the sea-level contribution of all Arctic glaciers estimated for 2006–2015, placing the circum-Barents region among the strongest contributors to the global sea-level rise in 2024.

The research team found much of the melting occurred within a 6-week period. Across this time, the atmospheric conditions were warmer than usual, and the area was experiencing a marine heat wave. Under current climate conditions, these temperatures are extremely rare however, some climate models suggest that these levels may become more common by the end of the 21st century. “We find that temperature levels as in 2024 represent a rare situation for contemporary climate conditions but will be frequently reached in a few decades,” write the authors. The team also conducted climate modelling based on their findings, which predicted that these kinds of extreme summers will become common by 2100, even under optimistic emission scenarios. "Our study shows that 2024 summer temperatures will be frequently reached in just a few decades and exceeded toward the end of the 21st century. The summer of 2024 on Svalbard thus provided a window into Arctic glacier meltdown in a warmer future, highlighting the severe mass loss of glaciers and its repercussions in other regions of the Arctic beyond Svalbard," the study authors write. “This suggests further that the summer of 2024 may represent the normal situation in 2100, and the observed mass loss of glaciers in 2024 indeed provides a view into future glacier meltdown in Svalbard and probably other parts of the Arctic.” Just last year, a NASA study found that the Greenland Ice sheet lost more ice than previously estimated with 179 of the 207 glaciers in focus having retreated significantly since 1985. According to the World Meteorological Organisation, 5 of the past 6 years have seen the most glacier retreat in human record, with 2022–2024 claiming the largest 3-year loss of glacier mass in recent history.