It’s official: High temperatures broke records in many parts of Norway this summer, and September is also off to an unusually warm start. Norway’s glaciers, meanwhile, keep melting and haven’t been smaller for 1,000 years.
Some even fear that the glacier on the iconic peak in the mountains of Dovre called Snøhetta will soon disappear. “No one in modern times has seen Snøhetta with such little snow and ice as now,” Atle Nesje, a geology professor at the University of Bergen, told newspaper Klassekampen on Friday.
Nesje specializes in glacier research and recently visited Dovre. He didn’t like what he saw, and said it’s just a matter of time before the ice completely disappears.
Officials at Norway’s national waterways and energy directorate plan more measuring of Norwegian glaciers’ volume this fall. Nesje expects more reduction, following a turning point after the year 2000. Since then, he told Klassekampen, there’s been more rapid reduction of Norwegian glaciers that have ranked as the largest in Europe.
“Well-known arms of glaciers in Vestlandet (Western Norway) have retracted by several hundred meters,” he said. Now he claims that Norway hasn’t been covered with so little snow and ice since Viking times. Melting ice, meanwhile, has recently revealed more items from the Viking age in the mountains, including weapons and even jewelry that had been covered for centuries.
While archaeologists are keen on such discoveries, the professor stressed that melting glaciers are bad news for the nature and people. It leads to much more turbulent weather, flooding and rising sea levels. “Not even several winters with lots of snow (like much of Norway has experienced the past few years) can compensate for the melting of snow and ice in warm summers,” he said.
Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago under Norwegian control, also reported a record-warm summer for the third year in a row. Svalbard had a cold winter and thermometers remained low through May and into early June, but after that, they soared, leading to more ice melting there too. State meteorologists reported that 60 weather stations around Norway logged record highs in August, most of them in Northern Norway and on Svalbard, and up to six degrees over normal. It was 22.5C (just over 70F) even on the Arctic island of Bjørnøya, located in the Barents Sea between Svalbard and Northern Norway.
The meteorologists reported this week that fully 100 weather stations around Norway set new records for high temperatures during the first week of September as well. It was 30.6C at Etne in Rogaland on the West Coast, 30C at Fister in Innlandet County and 28.2C at Nord-Odal in Østfold. Even more surprising was the thermometer that hit 25.9C in the northern city of Harstad.
Temperatures in some areas of Norway were higher than in the Canary Islands and Lisbon last week. Even though it’s getting dark again in the evenings, temperatures have stayed high, with some areas of Nordland reported what the Norwegians call tropenetter, when the temperature doesn’t fall below 20C.
State meteorologist Kristian Gislefoss could confirm on Friday that “summer is not over,” as the country headed into the weekend. Forecasts called for temperatures around 20C in many areas from north to south, and lots of sunshine in the south.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
