Svalbard Rapidly Greening as Temperatures Rise

Communications Earth & Environment, 16 January 2025

Today’s rapidly rising temperatures in the Arctic are changing the composition of its ecosystems, causing the Arctic to become greener. In turn, this affects the uptake of carbon through photosynthesis, which may potentially offset some of the CO2 released from thawing permafrost. Using sediment cores retrieved from a fjord in western Svalbard, researchers were able to detect the rapid expansion of tundra ecosystem across the region since 1900. The timing of greening mirrors the loss of summer sea ice and glacier retreat in the region, highlighting the widespread impacts of global warming and cryosphere loss on ecology and landscape evolution.

Full paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-01994-y