The archipelago of Svalbard, a land of ice and polar bears, is found midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Its capital Longyearbyen on the main island of Spitsbergen is the world’s most northerly city, some 800 miles inside the Arctic Circle.Svalbard is also home to some of the Earth’s northernmost glaciers, which bury most of the archipelago’s surface under no less than 200 metres of thick ice. Taken together, Svalbard glaciers represent 6% of the worldwide glacier area outside the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica – if they totally melted, they would raise the sea level by 1.7cm.Because they are so far north, these glaciers are found at relatively low elevations, mostly below 450 metres above sea level compared to 800 metres or more elsewhere in the Arctic. Moreover, they are shaped like domes with steep sides and extensive flat interiors. These peculiar features make Svalbard glaciers highly vulnerable to climate warming, as we discovered in our...
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