Last summer, Svalbard endured its hottest season on record—and the consequences were dramatic. A new study in PNAS shows the Arctic archipelago lost more than 60 billion tons of ice in just six weeks during the summer of 2024. That’s one percent of all the ice on Svalbard gone in less than two months.
For comparison, Greenland lost about 55 billion tons of ice over the same stretch, even though its ice sheet is fifty times larger.
“We saw melting far beyond what’s normal. At first, I thought the models must be wrong, but field checks confirmed it—this was real,” said University of Oslo professor Thomas V. Schuler.
The extreme melt was fuelled by a rare mix of record heat, moist air flowing north, and unusually warm seas. A persistent weather pattern locked warm, humid air over the islands, while the Barents and Norwegian Seas baked in a marine heat wave with surface temperatures up to five degrees above average. August ended up 3.7 degrees warmer than normal.
“It’s absolutely extreme. Usually, records are broken by fractions of a degree—here they were shattered by several,” said climate researcher Ketil Isaksen of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
A Photographer’s Proof
The scale of change isn’t just visible in data. Swedish photographer Christian Åslund has spent decades documenting the disappearing glaciers. In 2002, working with Greenpeace, he recreated century-old photographs from the Norwegian Polar Institute’s archives, showing ice-filled fjords transformed into bare rock and open water.
Finding the exact vantage points was painstaking. “It took hours to stand where the original photographers had been almost a hundred years earlier. To see the contrast was surreal,” Åslund recalled.
He returned to Svalbard during last summer’s record melt and found the ice had retreated even further—several more kilometres gone since his last visit 22 years earlier.
“The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, so we expected it. But to see it with your own eyes is still heartbreaking,” he said.
Warming Faster Than the World
The numbers confirm his experience. Globally, the Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the planet. In Svalbard, it’s closer to seven times faster since 1991.
That acceleration is why Åslund’s photos often spark disbelief. Some accuse him of altering the images or comparing different seasons. He pushes back with simple logic: the old and new images were all taken in summer, when fjords are ice-free and the sun never sets. Winter photos would show frozen seas and snow-choked mountains.
A Glimpse of the Future
What happened in 2024 may be a preview of what’s ahead. Climate models suggest summers like that could be normal within 20 to 30 years.
“If emissions remain high, then what we saw last year would actually count as a cold summer by the end of the century,” said Rasmus Benestad of the Meteorological Institute.
The consequences reach far beyond Svalbard. Melting ice contributes to rising seas and disrupts ecosystems from the high Arctic to coastlines worldwide.
One More Round
At 51, Åslund says he hopes to return at least once, maybe twice, to capture the changes again.
“A picture is worth a thousand words. My hope is that these images remind people that this isn’t abstract. It’s happening right now,” he said.