Svalbard: Climate change accelerates archipelago warming

Accelerating warming in the Svalbard archipelago provides a glimpse of the current and future impacts of climate change on the Arctic and around the world.

The Arctic is warming much faster than the global average, and temperatures in Svalbard are rising six times faster than the rest of the world.

“We will continue to see a rapid warming,” Rasmus Benestad, a scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Meteorology, told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday.

Benestad said Arctic warming is accelerating because sea ice is retreating, exposing warmer waters beneath it, in a chain reaction called polar amplification.

In July 2020, Svalbard set a record high temperature of 21.7 degrees Celsius.

A changing climate is affecting life in the region, with Benestad pointing to extreme rainfall in early 2012 and a deadly avalanche in December 2015.

In addition to melting permafrost, the loss of sea ice will cause global sea levels to rise.

“So it comes down to what we actually do with regard to global carbon emissions and fossil fuel use,” Benestad said. “But we certainly have to adapt to changes in the Svalbard region.”

Check out Rasmus Benestad’s full interview at the top of the article.