Unprecedented Arctic heatwave melted 1 per cent of Svalbard's ice

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By Michael Le Page, New Scientist.

Excerpt: During the summer of 2024, six weeks of record-smashing heat led to a record-obliterating amount of ice melting on the islands of Svalbard in the Arctic. By the end of the summer, 1 per cent of all the land ice on the archipelago had been lost – enough to raise the global average sea level by 0.16 millimetres. “It was very shocking,” says Thomas Schuler at the University of Oslo in Norway. “It was not just a marginal record. The melt was almost twice as high as in the previous record.”....


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