The heartbeat of a glacier surprised NASA scientists: the ice of Stonebreen in Norway apparently speeds up and slows down with the seasons, as if it had its own pulse.
Since this discovery in 2014, the space agency has been monitoring the movement of ice in Edgeøya, an island in the southeast of Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago located halfway between the mainland coast and the North Pole.
The result is an animation based on satellite data that shows, month by month, how fast the surface of the glacier moves.
What is the “heartbeat” of the Stonebreen glacier
NASA chose the red color to represent the variations in the speed of the ice throughout the year: the darker, the greater the movement.
In winter and spring, the ice flows slowly. But by the end of summer, it moves towards the Barents Sea at speeds exceeding 1,200 meters per year.
In the summer of 2020, the glacier reached its peak: 2,590 meters per year, equivalent to 23 feet per day.
Chad Greene, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), explained the mechanism behind this phenomenon.
“When the base of a glacier is flooded with meltwater, the water pressure increases and allows the glacier to slide more easily.”
This process occurs because the meltwater seeps from the surface to the rocky base of the glacier each summer.
The keys to this special glacier
Stonebreen belongs to an uncommon category: the so-called surge glaciers. Their main characteristics are:
- They alternate between periods of slow movement and sudden accelerations
- During fast phases, the ice can flow several times faster than usual
- These phases can last from months to years
- They only represent 1% of the world’s glaciers
- In Svalbard, they are relatively frequent
Before 2023, Stonebreen spent several years in a high-speed surge phase. According to Alex Gardner, a researcher at JPL, the melting at its front likely destabilized the glacier and initiated that period.
Even during that stage, the glacier maintained its seasonal rhythm: acceleration in summer and deceleration in winter.
Since 2023, however, the glacier has almost completely stopped. Only in summer, the melt causes a brief slide.
NASA confirmed that Stonebreen entered a quiet phase, a normal stage within the cycle of surge glaciers. “These seasonal pulses similar to heartbeats,” noted the agency.
The data comes from the ITS_LIVE project, developed at JPL, which detects glacier speed using optical and radar images.
In 2025, Greene and Gardner used it to analyze the seasonal variability of hundreds of thousands of glaciers around the planet.
