With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

etreated about 3 miles back up the fjord. The glaciers and ice sheets that
still cover two thirds of Svalbard are some of the best-studied in the world.
And visiting glaciologists leave each time with worsening news. In the
summer of 2005, British glaciologists discovered that the nearby Midtre
Lovenbreen glacier had lost 12 inches of height in a single week as it melted
in the sun. The Kronebreen glacier may be dumping close to 200,000
acre-feet of ice into the fjord every year.
Jack Kohler is attempting a "mass balance" of the ice of Svalbard. He
reckons that 20 million acre-feet melts and runs off into the ocean each year
now. Another 3 million acre-feet is lost from icebergs slumping into the sea
from 620 miles of ice cliffs. At most, half of this loss is being replaced with
new snow. That is an annual net loss of around 1 1 million acre-feet—a
staggering volume for a small cluster of islands, and probably second in the
Arctic only to the loss from the huge ice sheet covering Greenland. And there
is more to come, Kohler says. Many of Svalbard's glaciers and ice caps are
close to the freezing point and "very sensitive to quite small changes" in
temperature. Boreholes drilled into the permafrost show a staggering o.7°F
warming in the past decade. A few more tenths of a degree could be
catastrophic, he says.
Ny-Alesund is a cosmopolitan community, especially in summer, with
Norwegians and Germans, Swedes and British, Spanish and Finns, Italians
and French, Russians and Americans, Japanese and Chinese and Koreans. It
is also quirky. Checking some equipment in the empty Korean labs, I found a
pair of Spanish scientists hiding there. They said they couldn't afford the
accommodation fees in the main compound, but couldn't bear to give up