Inside Climate News: Melting on the Arctic’s Svalbard Islands Shows the Climate Future Is Now

Aug 19 – The rapid disintegration of glaciers on the islands north of Norway foreshadows a catastrophic future for the Arctic, scientists warn. The amount of ice that melted on Svalbard in the Barents Sea, made the region one of the most significant contributors to global sea level rise last year. Ice melt records set in 2020 and 2022 were just marginally greater than previous years, but an extreme and long Arctic heat wave last summer, intensified by weather patterns disrupted by climate change, opened a new page in the record books. The melting was “in a different league,” said Professor Thomas Vikhamar Schuler, at the University of Oslo and lead author of the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read ON.