Svalbard Glaciers Then and Now: Christian Åslund’s Repeat Photographs

The mountains in each pair of pictures are the same. The ice is not. In 2002 the Swedish photographer Christian Åslund travelled to Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, and photographed glaciers from the same viewpoints as historical images held by the Norwegian Polar Institute. Where walls of ice once met the sea, his photographs show open water and bare rock.

Christian Åslund’s Svalbard glacier comparison

Åslund, a photographer and filmmaker based in Stockholm, built the series from seven sets of images. In each pair below, the historical photograph from the Norwegian Polar Institute is on top and his 2002 photograph is beneath it. The trick of repeat photography is to stand where the earlier photographer stood, so that fixed features such as ridges and headlands line up and the change in the ice stands out. The series is presented on the photographer’s Glacier Comparison 2002 – Svalbard page.

The pictures spread widely in 2017, when National Geographic featured Åslund in its #MyClimateAction series. In 2024 he went back to Spitsbergen for a new project, Glacial Juxtaposition, comparing glaciers in 2002 and 2024.

Svalbard: an archipelago of ice

Svalbard covers about 61,000 km² of land, and glaciers cover about 60% of it, some 36,500 km². The largest, Austfonna on Nordaustlandet, covers 8,412 km² on its own. Norway’s sovereignty over the islands was recognised by the Svalbard Treaty of 9 February 1920. Around 2,900 people live here, most of them in Longyearbyen, which shares the islands with around 300 resident polar bears.

Svalbard is one of the fastest-warming places on earth. Between 1970 and 2020 its average temperature rose by 4 °C, and by 7 °C in the winter months. On 25 July 2020 a record 21.7 °C was measured.

The record melt of 2024

The photographs show change at single viewpoints; scientists measure it across the whole archipelago. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August 2025, by T. V. Schuler and six co-authors, found that Svalbard’s glaciers lost about 61.7 billion tonnes of ice between October 2023 and September 2024, roughly 1% of all the ice on the islands. The melt exceeded any previous observation.

• Most of it happened in about six weeks, from late July to early September.
• August 2024 was about 3.7 °C warmer than the 1991–2020 average, driven by a persistent flow of warm, moist air from the south.
• Svalbard lost about as much ice as the Greenland Ice Sheet that year, although Greenland’s ice covers an area about 50 times larger.
• Svalbard alone added about 0.16 mm to global sea level.

The authors project that summers as warm as 2024 will become common by the end of the century. The full study is freely available.

How to read a then-and-now photograph

Start with the mountains. A distinctive ridge or headland is the fixed point that links the two pictures; once it lines up, follow the glacier front and see how far it has moved back. Separate the glacier itself from loose floating ice in the water, and remember that seasonal snow can change how rock and ice look. People and boats in the frame give a sense of scale.

Glaciers, icebergs and frozen lakes tell different stories. An iceberg is a piece of glacier ice that has broken off and floats; lake ice forms each winter from the water below. See our Ferryland iceberg photo story and Lake Baikal winter photography feature.

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