The Return of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet

For those with an interest in climate and climate changes, few webcams are as informative as the one located at Dyranut in southern Norway. This is because Dyranut is located at the average height location of a vast mountain plateau called Hardangervidda. If this area does not fully thaw through the summer, it will be transformed into a giant glacier, which in turn will herald the onset of a major ice age that might last for thousands of years.

The European centerpiece of the next grand ice age, will be the same as it always was, namely the great Scandinavian ice sheet, a glacier so vast that it stretched all the way to Germany and England. At its center, it was more than a thousand meters thick.

While it will take thousands of years for the ice sheet to gain its maximum reach and thickness, only a decade of below average temperatures combined with above average precipitation is required for it to return to Norway. Once in place, the ice sheet will likely spread into surrounding valleys and lowlands. In less than hundred years, the Scandinavian ice sheet will make all of Norway uninhabitable.

A tiny change in the climate is all it takes for this to happen. If the snow-cover of winter doesn't fully thaw through the summer, next winter will simply add to what was left from the year before. If this repeats, there will be a glacier covering all of Hardangervidda within a decade. That would be a glacier hundreds of times bigger than any other glacier in Norway, and an absolute disaster.

As things currently stand, Dyranut does not fully thaw through the summer. When I visited the place back in August 2016, there were plenty of snow patches to be seen along the road, and we experienced the very first snow flurries of the winter during our one day visit. Had it not been for some unusually hot summers in Norway since then, glaciation might have been well on its way by now.

This winter has once again had an early start. We've also had a lot of snow, so it will be well into June before we see plenty of bare ground. However, there will be snow patches everywhere. Only above average summer temperatures will see all the snow patches gone as well, which leaves the very real possibility that some patches will start to grow in size over the coming years.

Hardangervidda's snow free season is usually from late May to mid-September. However, this appears to be changing. Short summers with snow disappearing in June, only to return in August, have become increasingly common. Locations higher up than Dyranut have seen shorter summers still, so if this persists, glaciers like Hardangerjøkulen will start growing. We may see a scenario in which established glaciers grow in size, while an entirely new and vastly bigger glacier forms on the enormous Hardangervidda plateau.

Those keeping an eye on the Dyranut webcam will have an advanced warning of this disaster. If snow remains plentiful through the summer, we may see dramatic climate changes for Norway and the entirety of northern Europe within decades.

By Berland - Own work, CC BY 2.5, Link