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Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago that 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 that melted more of its glaciers than ever before.

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.

Consequently, 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 aluminum poles fixed in the ice as reference markers to record changes in the glacier's surface, remote sensing data from satellites and climate modeling 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.

The paper is in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team found that Svalbard lost around 1% of its total ice mass, which amounts to 61.7 ± 11.1 gigatons of ice in the summer of 2024. 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 team also conducted climate modeling 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.

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