Svalbard saw high temperatures high in the summer of 2024
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During the summer of 2024, six weeks of record heat led to a record amount of ice based on the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic. At the end of the summer, 1% of all the terrestrial ice cream in the archipelago had been lost – enough to increase the average world level of the sea by 0.16 millimeters.
“It was very shocking,” explains Thomas Schuler at the University of Oslo in Norway. “It was not only a marginal record. The merger was almost twice higher than in the previous record.”
More than half of Svalbard is covered with ice. The winter snowfall add to the ice, while the flow of glaciers in the sea and the cast iron of the surface during the summer leads to a loss of ice.
Schuler’s team uses a combination of on -site measurements, satellite data and computer modeling to estimate how the total ice mass on the archipelago changes.
Since 1991, less than 10 ice gigatons have melted every summer, on average. But four of the past five years have set new records for loss of summer ice. In total, the team estimates that around 62 ice gigatons were lost last summer, almost entirely due to surface merger rather than ice in the sea.
Schuler and his colleagues also measured the rise of land in response to the loss of ice by a record of 16 mm on a site during the summer of 2024, which complies with their estimation of ice loss.
The exceptional merger was due to the record temperatures of air, with an average temperature of August 11 ° C (52 ° F) against around 7 ° C (45 ° F) in recent decades. This extreme event was, in turn, the result of warmer seas and a persistent meteorological model which caused hot winds in the south, in addition to large jumps in global warming.
Although this type of extreme summer heat is unlikely at present, climate models suggest that it will become common as the planet continues to warm up. In fact, even in a low -emission scenario, more than half of the summers by 2100 could exceed this level.
Schuler’s team has not yet tried to estimate the amount of ice lost in the future in various program scenarios. Winter snowfall should increase a little as the atmosphere becomes the most Mombre, but not enough to compensate for the much greater summer fusion.
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