As a glaciologist who thinks about ice so much, rewatching the film Frozen umpteen occasions with my six-year-old daughter supplies plentiful alternative for my creativeness to run wild. The film is ready within the fictional kingdom of Arendelle, which is modelled on a fjord panorama, entire with a big glacier on the head of Arenfjord. Ice unsurprisingly performs an overly distinguished position within the tale. But this glacier receives little or no consideration.
Glaciers are receding the world over at an unheard of charge. And on multiple instance I’ve questioned how Arendelle’s glacier would possibly have fared because the time of Frozen.
So as to add some medical rigour to this idea experiment, it turns out to be useful to approximate an actual geographical location. Arendelle is encouraged via the fjords of western Norway, a area the place many of the glaciers glide from the Jostedalsbreen ice cap, the most important ice mass in mainland Europe.
We will additionally approximate the date. In accordance with quite a lot of clues, together with the clothes and era on display, apparently the occasions in Frozen happen one July within the mid-Nineteenth century. This implies the glacier is depicted against the tip of the little ice age, a groovy length lasting a number of centuries all through which maximum northern hemisphere glaciers expanded to their biggest dimension in fresh historical past.
Frozen depicts an international earlier than trendy local weather trade.
Disney
Within the film, the glacier plunges from a top elevation plateau into the fjord beneath and appears steep and crevassed on the entrance. This means a wholesome, advancing glacier, in a an identical situation to the numerous outlet glaciers of Jostedalsbreen that reached their little ice age most positions round this time.
The fast-term well being of Arendelle’s glacier could have been additional boosted via the unseasonal summer season snowstorm and chilly temperatures that Elsa’s powers unleashed at the kingdom.
Actual glaciers are shrinking speedy
The destiny of the fictitious glacier because the little ice age would had been much less certain, as demonstrated via the very genuine glaciers of Jostedalsbreen. This era has been characterized via speeded up local weather warming, inflicting popular glacier retreat and thinning.
Since Elsa’s time, the actual glaciers it’s in accordance with have gotten smaller via a few 5th. Person glaciers have retreated a number of kilometres at charges of as much as 20 metres in keeping with 12 months. This makes it most probably that, with out any longer assist from Elsa, Arendelle’s glacier would have retreated onto land inside a long time of the time of the movie.
How Jostedalsbreen’s glaciers have retreated from the little ice age (purple define) to nowadays (blue).
Andreassen et al. 2023
Within the overdue Eighties and early Nineties, an building up in iciness snowstorm in western Norway supposed maximum main glaciers within the area started to advance as much as a couple of hundred metres. The Arendelle glacier would possibly due to this fact have grown once more for a time, even though almost certainly no longer sufficient for the glacier to re-enter the fjord. Whilst there are different explanations, the extra imaginative thoughts would possibly imagine the likelihood {that a} descendent of Elsa was once accountable for this era of greater snowstorm.
Because the early 2000s, those self same glaciers have gotten smaller considerably, backing out via as much as 70 metres in keeping with 12 months. That’s in large part as a result of upper air temperatures imply extra ice is melting in summer season. A number of of Jostedalsbreen’s glaciers have retreated nearly again onto the plateau, whilst others are disconnecting from the bigger ice our bodies which have been nourishing them for hundreds of years.
What would Arendelle’s glacier appear to be nowadays?
Retreat of this scale method the fictitious glacier nowadays would possibly glance one thing like Briksdalsbreen, now only a small tongue spilling over from the plateau ice in the back of. Certainly, it’s relatively conceivable that during 2025, designated via the UN because the Global Yr of Glaciers’ Preservation, Arendelle’s glacier would not had been visual from Arendelle Fortress.
Briksdalsbreen, one in every of Jostedalsbreen’s outlet glaciers, displays what the Arendelle glacier would possibly glance nowadays.
Nataliya Nazarova / shutterstock
So, if Arendelle’s glacier had been genuine, it might be a shadow of its Nineteenth-century self – just like its real-life Norwegian equivalents. Via 2050, roughly 200 years after the time of Frozen, the glacier would almost certainly have retreated onto the plateau. The ice cap would even have thinned significantly and would possibly also be within the early phases of terminal get a divorce.
On the other hand, whilst that is one possible situation for Jostedalsbreen within the twenty first century, it’s on no account sure. Local weather scientists agree that concerted motion is had to scale back greenhouse gasoline emissions to restrict warming.
Magic helped Arendelle as soon as. This time, it’ll take real-world motion to verify the actual glaciers have a combating likelihood of nonetheless being round by the point Frozen 3 is in spite of everything launched.
