Summer in Svalbard: Ice scientists fighting against warmest season on record
Climate research scientists are investigating how changes to temperatures are impacting the local wildlife
Glaciers have shaped the arctic archipelago of Svalbard for millennia.
The islands have just had their warmest summer on modern record - temperatures 3C above the average.
This is evidence that our climate is nearing a tipping point.
Ice scientist Dorothea Moser is taking me from the British arctic station to the rapidly retreating Broggerbreane glacier.
As we walk past treeless slopes contorted by tectonic movement, Dorothea shows me how the ice has shaped the geology over millions of years.
Glaciers have grown and shrunk so what’s to make us think current changes aren’t just natural fluctuations? Her answer is short and clear.
“It’s all to do with the speed and the scale.”
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Centuries ago this 3,000 year-old glacier touched the fjord. Now it’s a five kilometre walk to get there.
“If you look at this ice you can see bubbles. Bubbles which contain a glimpse of our past,” Dorothea tells me.
"These bubbles contain gas from our atmosphere hundreds of years ago. It turns out the deeper you drill, the further into our past you can see."
Ice cores in Antarctica - which are at least 800,000 years old show how spikes in carbon dioxide mirror spikes in temperature.
Currently the world is getting warmer with no signs of that peaking. Carbon dioxide levels, fueled by man-made gases, are at unprecedented levels.
The ice here is losing 1.2 metres of thickness a year - twice the rate of the 80s.
We can see the glacier’s life ebbing away. Snaking streams of iron-rich red meltwater leaching into the fjord.
We see a pod of beluga whales apparently enjoying the nutrient-rich water. Their numbers have stabilised since hunting was capped.
On land things are changing too. For 10 years, British Antarctic Scientist Kevin Newsham has been studying the greenification of the Arctic.
Mini glass houses warm soil by a degree to see what vegetation will grow in the future.
In the lab, he’s trying to understand whether the amount of carbon collected by photosynthesis will offset the amount released by microbes in the thawing soil.
He tells me: “The important thing about that is that the amount of carbon that's within the soil of the Arctic is about three times the amount that's present in the Earth's atmosphere.
"So if all of that carbon gets burned off into atmosphere, that's a potentially very, very bad situation.”
These islands are only the size of Scotland - but there’s enough glacial ice here to raise global sea levels 1.7 centimetres if they melt.
That won’t happen overnight - but it is speeding up.
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