Our Brutal Winter Is a Beach Vacation Compared to an Arctic 'Icepocalypse'

​If you're reading this somewhere in North America, ​the odds are good that it's total shit outside. This is particularly true in the Midwest, where a series of all-out snow events is currently colliding with a brief period of warmer weather, turning many feet of snow into many feet of white concrete. Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast is in the crosshairs of tornado-spewing severe superstorms. Here, in the mountains of south-central Washington state, it's inch after inch of rain propelled by 40 mile per hour blasts of wind. Relatively mild.

Whatever flavor of severe, even deadly weather is currently targeting your general area, it almost certainly has nothing on the Arctic "icepocalypse" that devastated Sweden's Svalbard archipelago two winters ago, knocking out radio communications, killing off herds of reindeer, and capturing everything in a thick armor of ice.

​As described in this week's edition of the Environmental Research Letters, the event consisted of a two-week period of unseasonable warmth, with average temperatures in January and February of 4 degrees Celsius (40 degrees Fahrenheit). The average for the area is around -16°C. The warmth resulted in permafrost warming/melting up to 5 meters below the surface. This is on top of a larger, decades-old permafrost warming trend that's so-far extended a full 60 meters below the surface.

The warming-freezing that occurred during this two-week period led to a number of rain on snow (ROS) events, with the result being anywhere from 10 to 20 centimeters (8 inches) of ice coating absolutely everything. Some of these ice sheets persisted even through June. The ice shut down the archipelago's airport and its radio communications antenna, and closed roads even to snowmobiles and dog-sledders.

For wildlife, the ice caused something known as pasture locking. Basically, this is when ice keeps foraging animals from their winter food supplies. Past icing events saw herds drop by as much as 70 percent, which might even be considered a conservative figure for what happened in 2012.

Then there were the avalanches, but not just any avalanches. "The heavy rainfall during the early phase of the warm spell triggered several slush avalanches in and close to the major settlement, Longyearbyen, which is located in a U-shaped valley with steep mountain sides," the paper describes. "In the city centre, a major avalanche hit and destroyed a pedestrian bridge following around 20 milimeters of rain during a 12 hour period on 30 January, and all roads in and around Longyearbyen were closed for up to several days due to other avalanches."

It shouldn't be a surprise to hear that the Svalbard icepocalypse is a postcard from the climate change future. The effects of global warming will be more pronounced and felt sooner in tundra regions like this one than pretty much anywhere else. The study, which comes courtesy of a team led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Brage B Hansen, paints a bleak picture.

"The predicted warming implies more frequent episodes with above-zero winter temperatures," the paper explains, "and if the projections hold, we can even expect to see some winters with mid-winter mean temperatures above 0 °C after about 2050. Accordingly, the frequency of [rain-on-snow] events and annual [rain-on-snow] amount will likely increase dramatically as the probability of crossing the near-zero °C threshold for precipitation falling as rain rather than snow increases."

"Clearly, this may have far-reaching implications for Arctic societies and ecosystems through changes in snow-pack and permafrost properties," Hansen et al warn. "Accordingly, this study from an Arctic 'hotspot' of climate change represents a bellwether of how winter climate change, and extreme events in particular, may cause radical changes in the geophysical environment, with a multitude of severe effects on society and wildlife."