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(CNN) - The Russian Navy has discovered five new islands in the Arctic after they were revealed by the melting of glaciers.
The Navy first saw the islands in 2016 using satellite images, but only confirmed them and mapped them in August and September during an expedition to the site, the Russian Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday.
The new islands are located near the Vylki glacier, on the coast of the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago, which is located in the Arctic Ocean northwest of the Russian continent. They range in an area of 900 to 54,500 square meters, and are as large as 10 soccer fields.
"Basically, this (discovery) is associated with the melting of ice," expedition leader Aleksandr Moiseyev said Tuesday, according to state news agency TASS. "Previously they were glaciers, but the melting of the ice led to the appearance of the islands."
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Moiseyev added that, since the islands have already been traced, the findings will now be officially registered and the islands will be named.
Researchers at the Russian Navy have been using satellite data for years to study changes on the coast, according to the Ministry of Defense. Between 2015 and 2018, they confirmed more than 30 new islands, layers and bays along the two archipelagos of Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land.
A student named Marina Migunova was the first to detect the five islands in 2016 while writing her final grade article, according to the Ministry of Defense. She is now an oceanographic measurement services engineer for the Navy.
In the years after their discovery, the researchers photographed and surveyed the islands before an expedition launched in mid-August to visit the islands in person.
The expedition included scientists and documentary filmmakers from the Russian Geographical Society and the Russian Arctic National Park, according to the Ministry of Defense. In addition to visiting the Novaya Zemlya, the crew also visited Franz Josef Land, conducting research and examining the ocean and land.
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This discovery comes after a similar one made in January, when glaciers in the Canadian Arctic melted enough to reveal lands that had been hidden for at least 40,000 years.
Scientists warn that emerging islands are not coincidences, but the direct result of the growing climate crisis as the Arctic undergoes a massive melting of glaciers and sea ice.
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the world average, and the resulting glacial melt could potentially destroy the life cycle that begins there and threaten the lives of people across the planet.
This summer, the Greenland ice sheet lost 11,000 million tons of ice in just one day in August, after months of record temperatures. The previous month, the total amount of ice lost was 197,000 million tons, the equivalent of about 80 million Olympic pools. Experts say the expected average would be between 60,000 and 70,000 million tons at this time of year.
Also in August, scientists said goodbye to Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier that was lost due to climate change.
If glaciers continue to melt at this rate, rising sea levels could displace up to a fifth of the world's population by the year 2100. Entire island nations like the Maldives could also disappear underwater, millions of people could face the shortage of water. food and drinking water, and pollution and disease can lead to health crises.
glaciersRussia
