Fresh snow is rare in the Arctic Circle, even in winter.

In the Arctic Circle, it has become difficult even to collect fresh snow in winter : these are the testimonies of researchers on the field in the Svalbard Islands during a scientific campaign in the middle of winter, in February 2025, led by James Bradley of Queen Mary University of London, who described the dramatic melting of the ice in an article published in Nature Communication.

"Standing in pools of water at the base of the glacier , or on the bare, green tundra , was shocking and surreal," Bradley explained of the mission, which took place in the dead of winter: equipped to withstand the extreme cold, with thermal layers, thick gloves and insulating down jackets, the group instead found themselves working barehanded in the rain.

“ The goal of our fieldwork campaign was to study fresh snow , but in a two-week period we only managed to collect fresh snow once , as most of the precipitation fell as rain ,” explained Laura Molares Moncayo, one of the study’s co-authors.

A testimony from field researchers confirms climate model predictions, which predict Svalbard will experience warming six to seven times greater than the global average, and winter temperatures will rise nearly twice as fast as the annual average . The article emphasizes that winter warming in the Arctic is no longer an exception and challenges the image of a permanently frozen Arctic in winter.