Depths of Winter

Estabilishing a baseline survey for high resolution glacier melt on Edgeøya.

Since the mid-1980s, the ablation zone of Svalbard glaciers has been rapidly expanding (Noël et al., 2020). In the warm summer of 2013, the ablation zone even covered the entire glacier area of Edgeøya, eastern Svalbard. Following strong atmospheric warming, the snow layer formed in previous winters (firn) is barely able to survive throughout the summer, exposing the underlying dark bare ice at the surface, hence enhancing melt. As a result, glaciers of Edgeøya have likely tipped into a state of sustained mass loss, where summer melt in expanding ablation zones exceeds the shallow winter snowfall accumulation.