Svalbard Project
We are an official supporter of the “Svalbard Climate Change Project”, a collaboration born in February 2023 between KAMPOS and Hedda Andersen.
Hedda Andersen is a glaciologist residing in the Northernmost settlement in the world, Longyearbyen at 78 degrees North. She is in the works of completing her Master Degree on the impact of climate change on Svalbard’s glaciers with the University Centre in Svalbard and University of Oslo.
We donate part of our proceed to support Hedda in her studies and research projects which aim at mapping the response of glacier to climate change on Svalbard.
The climate on Svalbard is one of the fastest changing on our planet. The effect of increasing air temperature and precipitation rates on the archipelago is mainly caused by the extreme and accelerating loss of sea ice surrounding Svalbard in winter. The loss of sea ice is strongly linked to increasingly warmer Atlantic water pushing Northward towards the North Pole at an unprecedented scale.
The large-scale climate changes on Svalbard have a direct effect on the frozen environment and in particular the glaciers. Consequently, all of Svalbard’s glaciers have been retreating since the 1990’s without exception.
It is important to understand the rate at which Svalbard’s glaciers are retreating, to be able to estimate the future glacial inventory and global sea level contribution from the melting glaciers.
Hedda’s researchis based on temporal series of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) / drone surveys of glaciers and glacial forefields, to map out the changes over time. By acquiring aerial images,shecanconstruct a digital elevation model and estimate changes over time by subtracting one model from another from a previous year. By doing so,shecan estimate changes in glaciers and forefields down to a centimetre and convert this into volumetric change over time.