These are unusual times for Ny-Alesund, the world’s most northerly community. Perched high above the Arctic Circle, on Svalbard, normally a place gripped by shrieking winds and blizzards, it was caught in a heatwave a few days ago.
Temperatures soared to the highest ever recorded here, an extraordinary 19.6C, a full degree-and-a-half above the previous record. Researchers lolled in T-shirts and soaked up the sun: a high life in the high Arctic.
It was an extraordinary vision, for this huddle of multi-coloured wooden huts — a community of different Arctic stations run by various countries and perched at the edge of a remote, glacier-rimmed fjord — is only 600 miles from the North Pole.
That they could bask in the sun merely confirms what these scientists have long suspected: that Earth’s high latitudes are warming dangerously thanks to man-made climate change, with temperatures rising at twice the global average. Clearly, Ny-Alesund has much to tell us.
For a start, this bleakly beautiful landscape is changing. Twenty years ago, giant icy fingers of glaciers spread across its fjords, including the Kungsfjorden where Ny-Alesund is perched.
‘When I first came here, 20 years ago, the Kronebreen and Kongsvegen glaciers swept round either side of the Colletthogda peak at the end of the fjord,’ said Nick Cox, who runs the UK’s Arctic Research Station, one of several different national outposts at Ny-Alesund.
‘Today they have retreated so far the peak will soon become completely isolated from ice. Similarly, the Blomstrand peninsula opposite us is now an island. Not long ago a glacier used to link it with coastline.’
You get a measure of these changes from the old pictures in Ny-Alesund’s tiny museum, dedicated to the miners who first created this little community and dug in blizzards, winters of total darkness and bitter cold until 1962, when explosions wrecked the mine, killing 22 people. The landscape then was filled with bloated glaciers. Today they look stunted and puny.
This does not mean all its glaciers are losing ice, of course. Sometimes it builds up at their summits but is lost at their snouts, and this can be can misleading, as the climate sceptics claim. Recent research at Ny-Alesund indicates this idea is simply wrong, however.
Gareth Rees and Neil Arnold of Cambridge University are using a laser measuring instrument called Lidar, flown on a Dornier 228 aircraft, to measure in pinpoint detail the topography of glaciers. An early survey of the Midre-Lovenbreen glacier at Ny-Alesund ‘shows there has been considerable loss of [the] glacier’s ice mass in recent years,’ said Arnold.
‘Natural climatic changes are no doubt involved, but there is no doubt in my mind that man-made changes have also played a major role.’
This turns out to be an almost universal refrain of scientists working here. They know the behaviour of these great blue rivers of ice can tell us much about the health of our planet. As a result, droves of young UK researchers, armed with water gauges, GPS satellite positioning receivers and rifles (to ward off predatory polar bears) head off from Ny-Alesund to study the local glaciers and gauge how man-made global warming affects them.
It is exhausting work that requires lengthy periods of immersion in glacier melt-water. The outcome of these labours is clear, however. ‘Glaciers are shrinking all over Svalbard,’ said Tristram Irvine-Fynn of Sheffield University. ‘Ice loss is about 4.5 cubic kilometres of ice a year.’
The Arctic is melting, in other words. And soon the rest of the world will be affected, as Phil Porter of the University of Hertfordshire, another UK researcher on field studies in Ny-Alesund, points out: ‘I have studied glaciers across the world, for example in the Himalayas, and we are seeing the same thing there. The consequences for that region are more serious, however. Rivers rise and wash away farming land.’
Humanity clearly needs to take careful notice to what is happening to the beautiful desolate area. ‘This place is important because it is so near the pole, far closer than most Antarctic bases are to the South Pole,’ said Trud Sveno, head of the Norwegian Polar Institute here.
‘We have found that not only are glaciers retreating dramatically, but the extent of the pack ice that used to stretch across the sea from here to the pole is receding. It is now at an absolute minimum since records began.’
Nor is it hard to pinpoint the culprit. On Mount Zeppelin, which overlooks Ny-Alesund, Swedish and Norwegian researchers have built one of the most sensitive air-monitoring laboratories in the world, part of a network of stations that constantly test our atmosphere.
Instruments in the little station — reached by an antiquated two-person cable car that can swing alarmingly in the whistling, polar wind — suck in air and measure their levels of carbon dioxide, methane, other pollutants and gases. It is a set-up of stunning sensitivity. Light up a cigarette at the mountain’s base and the station’s instruments will detect your exhalations, it is claimed.
Carbon dioxide, produced by cars and factories across the globe, is the real interest here, however. Over the past 15 years, not only have levels continued to rise from around 350 to 380 parts per million (ppm), but this rise is now accelerating.
In 1990 this key cause of global warming was rising at a rate of 1 ppm; by 1998 it was increasing by 2ppm; and by 2003 instruments at Mount Zeppelin showed it was growing by 3ppm. ‘Never before has carbon dioxide increased at the rate it does now,’ adds Sveno.
Such research reveals the importance of Svalbard to Europe and the rest of the world, and explains why there is a constant pilgrimage of hydrologists, ornithologists, marine biologists, glaciologists, plant experts and other researchers to the station. The work is hard, although life here has improved a lot since coal was mined at Ny-Alesund.
Buildings are warm and snug, radios and GPS receivers ensure safety in bad weather, and fresh food is shipped in weekly. The base is also kept under careful ecological control. Barnacle geese and their goslings, fiercely territorial Arctic terns, reindeer and Arctic foxes are allowed to wander between the station’s huts.
Apart from the ferocious, unpredictable weather, it is all quite idyllic and very different from Ny-Alesund’s former days. Miners had none of this, nor did the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.
After beating Scott to the South Pole, Amundsen used Ny-Alesund as his base for his next great triumph, setting sail by zeppelin to cross the North Pole to Alaska in 1926. The mooring gantry for his ship still towers over the settlement as well as a statue dedicated to the great man.
Teams of young researchers now march past these monuments every day, heading out to work on the Arctic landscape he helped to open up and which is now sending humanity a grim warning about our planet. – Guardian Unlimited Â