This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

A new study released this week presents the record ice melt on the Svalbard islands in summer 2024 as a glimpse into a future where other Arctic ice masses, including those on Greenland, could melt faster than currently anticipated.

The amount of ice that melted on Svalbard, the archipelago north of Norway in the Barents Sea, made the region one of the most significant contributors to global sea level rise last year.

Ice melt records set in 2020 and 2022 were just marginally greater than previous years, but an extreme and long Arctic heat wave last summer, intensified by weather patterns disrupted by climate change, opened a new page in the record books. Th

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