Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It is one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas and is a popular attraction for tourists. Svalbard is famous for rugged, remote terrain of glaciers and frozen tundra sheltering polar bears, Svalbard reindeer, and Arctic foxes. The Northern Lights are visible during winter, and its summer features the “midnight sun”—sunlight 24 hours a day. It is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which provides safe, free, and long-term storage of seed duplicates from all gene banks and nations around the world.
Over half of Svalbard’s land area is covered with ice and accounts for about 6% of the planet’s glaciated area outside of Greenland and Antarctica. But Svalbard is also one of the fastest-warming places on Earth.
It has suffered extreme episodes of melting this summer, brought on by exceptionally high air temperatures. In late July and early August, temperatures hovered around 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average for this part of the Arctic Circle, causing snow and ice to rapidly melt.
According to scientists, Svalbard’s ice caps broke their all-time record for daily surface melt on July 23rd, shedding nearly half a foot of water equivalent that day, a rate five times larger than normal.
On August 11th, the high temperature in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s capital city, reached 68 degrees, the highest August temperature on record and 4 degrees above the previous monthly record. Svalbard experienced its warmest summer on record in 2023.
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Photo, posted September 21, 2016, courtesy of Christopher Michel via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio
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