Ny-Ålesund: The scientists on the front line of global warming in the Arctic Circle

ITV News' Science Correspondent Martin Stew, Health and Science Producer Philip Sime and Camera Operator Barnaby Green report from Svalbard in the Arctic Circle

The Arctic is the rapidly melting front line of global warming.

The island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway, is warming around three times faster than most places on our planet.

Understanding how and why it's melting so fast could hold the key to preparing the planet for our changing climate.

We’ve been invited to join scientists from the Natural Environment Research Council and the British Antarctic Survey at their base in Ny-Ålesund.

At 78.55 degrees north - just a few hundred miles from the North Pole - it is the world’s northernmost settlement.

To reach the town requires a flight on a twin-turboprop plane from Longyearbyen, the main settlement on Spitsbergen.

The island is roughly the size of Scotland, but fewer than 3,000 people live there.

As we bump through the low cloud, you get glimpses of huge glaciers snaking beneath. The island is browner than I had expected.

At this time of year, snow and ice levels are always at their lowest but things appear to be becoming more extreme.

Henry Burgess of the UK Arctic Office explains how Svalbard's temperature has changed over the past 50 years, and why it matters for the rest of the world

After landing on a gravel runway, we head into the old mining town, which is now an international hub for polar research.

There are teams here from 10 different countries ranging to Norway to Germany, Japan, South Korea and even China.

We meet French scientists Thomas Poinsot and Celas Marie-Sainte. Their team has been releasing weather balloons daily since the 1980s.

Their data has contributed to recordings which show average winters in Svalbard are 7.7 degrees celcius warmer now than they were 50 years ago.

This warming is at a rate far faster than previous fluctuations long before the industrial revolution.

I asked Celas what his response is to people who deny man-made emissions are impacting our climate. "It's a complicated question," he said.

"Usually those people don't want to get facts. But here we are, everybody who lives in Svalbard can see changes … a couple of decades ago it was possible to cross the fjord directly with the snow mobile."

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"The islands in front of us right now was part of the glacier before. So all these changes have happened," Celas continued.

"And it is fact. So if you see a picture of before and a picture of today, it is different. And it's not naturally different," he added.

Over the next few days we’ll be heading out to take a closer look at the glaciers retreating fast and following different scientific teams as they race to monitor ice cores before they melt.

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