About a hundred years ago, Norwegian cartographers photographed Svalbard's glaciers. They were archived with 15,000 images. This summer, master student Erik Schytt Holmlund, along with three assistants, went back to exactly the same places to take new pictures. They wanted to see what had happened since then. They visited 15 glaciers and what they saw was amazing.
- It's an unpleasant sight. Most of these views are still incredibly powerful, but you can see how much more powerful they were a hundred years ago. The change is extreme. Those who came with us had no words, says Erik Schytt Holmlund, who studies glaciology at Svalbard University.
The temperature has risen more in Svalbard than anywhere else in Europe. Here, climate change is twice as fast. Since the pictures were taken in the early 1900s, the air temperature has risen by about 5 degrees, most of all in winter.
The fastest warming has been the last 20 years. According to the researchers, the glaciers seem to melt faster.
- These glaciers are incredible symbols of the changes that are happening. The change we are experiencing here is not only happening in Svalbard, it is happening all over the world.
But the glaciers are large and respond slowly to climate change. The fact that they melted during the 20th century is partly due to the fact that at the turn of the last century we left a several hundred year-long cold period behind us, the so-called little ice age. It had made the glaciers big when the old pictures were taken. But human climate change plays a crucial role, scientists believe.
- I think that's our impact. We have increased the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere quite sharply since 1850, and it is probably the human impact that makes the climate warmer and thus the ice melts. It may be that they melt after little ice age, but it is certainly also the warming that we are responsible for, ”says Nina Kirchner, assistant professor of glaciology at Stockholm University.