On 10 March 2025, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake on an Arctic transform fault triggered a rock avalanche on Jan Mayen Island, burying a third to half of Kjerulf Glacier under nearly a million cubic meters of rock. The quake struck 7 kilometers offshore, and the avalanche followed three minutes later.
Researchers led by Guilherme de Melo at GEOMAR combined seismic, GNSS, infrasound, satellite, and climate data to explain why this quake caused an avalanche when other strong Arctic quakes have not. They found smaller rockslides in 2017, 2019, 2023, and 2024 had weakened the slope, and because no ground shaking preceded those slides, they suspect warming air temperatures degraded permafrost and reduced the strength of ice-filled fractures.
Eirini Makopoulou, a physical geographer at Stockholm University not involved in the work, praised the data synthesis but was not entirely convinced permafrost degradation was the key driver. She called it “plausible” and said direct rock-temperature measurements would strengthen the connection. She also noted that a single event cannot establish how widespread such susceptibility might be.
de Melo pointed to similar events in Greenland and Alaska and warned that Svalbard, with active transform faults and vulnerable permafrost, may face comparable risk. Kjerulf Glacier is expected to remain buried “for a long time to come.”