These are unusual times for Ny-Alesund, the world's most northerly community. Perched high above the Arctic Circle, on Svalbard, normally a place gripped by shrieking winds and blizzards, it was caught in a heatwave a few days ago.
Temperatures soared to the highest ever recorded here, an extraordinary 19.6?C, a full degree-and-a-half above the previous record. Researchers lolled in T-shirts and soaked up the sun: a high life in the high Arctic.
It was an extraordinary vision, for this huddle of multi-colored wooden huts -- a community of different Arctic stations run by various countries and perched at the edge of a remote, glacier-rimmed fjord -- is only 966km from the North Pole.
That they could bask in the sun merely confirms what these scientists have long suspected: that Earth's high latitudes are warming dangerously thanks to man-made climate change, with temperatures rising at twice the global average. Clearly, Ny-Alesund has much to tell us.
For a start, this bleakly beautiful landscape is changing. Twenty years ago, giant icy fingers of glaciers spread across its fjords, including the Kungsfjorden where Ny-Alesund is perched.
"When I first came here, 20 years ago, the Kronebreen and Kongsvegen glaciers swept round either side of the Colletthogda peak at the end of the fjord," said Nick Cox, who runs the UK's Arctic Research Station, one of several different national outposts at Ny-Alesund.
'Today they have retreated so far the peak will soon become completely isolated from ice. Similarly, the Blomstrand peninsula opposite us is now an island. Not long ago a glacier used to link it with coastline.'
You get a measure of these changes from the old pictures in Ny-Alesund's tiny museum, dedicated to the miners who first created this little community and dug in blizzards, winters of total darkness and bitter cold until 1962, when explosions wrecked the mine, killing 22 people. The landscape then was filled with bloated glaciers. Today they look stunted and puny.
This does not mean all its glaciers are losing ice, of course. Sometimes it builds up at their summits but is lost at their snouts, and this can be can misleading, as the climate sceptics claim. Recent research at Ny-Alesund indicates this idea is simply wrong, however.
Gareth Rees and Neil Arnold of Cambridge University are using a laser measuring instrument called Lidar, flown on a Dornier 228 aircraft, to measure in pinpoint detail the topography of glaciers.
An early survey of the Midre-Lovenbreen glacier at Ny-Alesund "shows there has been considerable loss of [the] glacier's ice mass in recent years," said Arnold.
"Natural climatic changes are no doubt involved, but there is no doubt in my mind that man-made changes have also played a major role," he said.
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