Eight Swedish glaciers disappeared in 2024: expert

STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Eight of Sweden’s 277 glaciers melted completely during 2024 and are now extinct due to global warming, the head of the Tarfala Research Station in northern Sweden told AFP on Monday.

Another 30 glaciers are at risk, glaciology professor Nina Kirchner said.

The extinct glaciers “won’t come back in our lifetime and not if global warming continues”, she told AFP.

Kirchner and her colleagues at the Tarfala Research Station, near Sweden’s highest peak Kebnekaise in the far north, study satellite images of the country’s glaciers every year to track their development.

“At the beginning of 2025, when we sat down to do our 2024 update to see when the glaciers were at their smallest, we couldn’t find eight of the glaciers on the satellite images.”

“At first we thought we had done something wrong or missed something,” she said.

The group double-checked their data and concluded that “the eight are gone”.

Among the eight was Sweden’s northernmost glacier, Cunujokeln in the Vadvetjakka national park.

The biggest of the eight was about the size of six football pitches.

“2024 was an extremely warm year. The heat has eaten away at these glaciers and made them disappear,” Kirchner said.

They are the first glaciers to disappear entirely in Sweden, at least since high-resolution satellite images were introduced around the year 2000, she explained.

2024 was the hottest year on record for the planet, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The massive use of coal, oil and fossil gas for energy since the industrial revolution is the primary driver of human-induced global heating.

Kirchner said she did not expect any other Swedish glaciers to become extinct in 2025 due to a winter with lots of snowfall and a short summer with overall cooler temperatures.

“But there will be more warm summers and we have to be prepared for the fact that more (glaciers) will disappear,” she said.