Europe is warming twice as fast as other continents and Svalbard is the most exposed, writes fn.no. Several countries in Europe had their warmest year ever in 2022, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU climate change service Copernicus.
Svalbard is the place in the world where the temperature is increasing the most. The reason is that Svalbard is located on the border of sea ice and open waters and the difference in temperature is especially great here, especially in the winter, according to Tore Furevik, Director of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center and Professor at the University of Bergen.
"Warmer air and warmer waters have led the ice to retreat northwards and eastwards, so that Svalbard has "come out of" the ice. If you look at the data, you can see that the temperature in Longyearbyen on Svalbard has risen by just under three degrees in the summer and as much as nine degrees in the winter," says Furevik.
From 1997 to 2022, glaciers in Europe lost around 880 cubic kilometers of ice. The Alps were worst hit, with an average reduction in ice thickness of 34 metres. In 2022, glaciers in the Alps experienced a new record loss of mass in a single year, triggered by low winter snowfall, an extremely hot summer and dust deposits from the Sahara.
The melting of the Greenland ice sheet contributed around 14.9 millimeters to the global average sea level rise. And scientific assessments show it continued to lose mass through 2022, according to the WMO report.
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