Climate Change Series Only a few hundred miles from the North Pole, the Ny Alesund research centre, on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, is one of the most northerly permanent research bases in the world. An icy wind sweeps off the snow-covered mountains down to a large fjord, littered with small pieces of sea ice, and across the bay an Arctic glacier is tumbling slowly into the sea.
Here, climate change scientists from as far afield as Japan have been able to observe at first hand the effects of global warming on one of the most desolate landscapes on earth – sometimes just by looking out the window. Their observations confirm that the Arctic ice cap is melting, and at a rate that is outstripping scientific predictions.
