Scientists warn: Several of the world's ice caps "beyond saving"

It is called the cryosphere; all the parts of the world that have frozen water. And it is in a state that humanity has never before experienced.

The great ice sheets are shrinking at a pace that surpasses anything since the end of the last ice age. The permafrost is warmer than it has been in the last 11,000 years. The snow disappears. The sea ice is melting away.

All in all, this now means that the cryosphere, which covers one tenth of the Earth's land surface, is outside what scientists call a "safe operating space", SOS - or safe planetary boundaries in Swedish.

Those affected first and worst are those living in the immediate vicinity of the glaciers, such as in Nepal which recently suffered a sudden glacier collapse with catastrophic flooding as a result – or those living in low-lying coastal areas hit hard by rising seas.

Another example is indigenous people whose lifestyle depends on access to snow and ice, such as the reindeer-herding Sami because the reindeer find it difficult to reach food when the heat melts the snow.

But you shouldn't think that the rest of the world can cope without impact, points out Albert Norström, researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University.

- The consequences of this will not stop at the poles or high up in the mountains where the glaciers are. It affects people and ecosystems all over the world, he says.

For example, several billion people depend on the melting of glaciers for fresh water supply and agriculture, as in the area around the Himalayas. Global warming may also accelerate as the cryosphere shrinks, with ice and snow disappearing and being replaced by darker oceans and land. This causes the so-called albedo of the earth's surface to decrease, i.e. the reflective effect, which means that more of the solar energy remains on the earth.

When permafrost thaws, large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, are also released, which were previously frozen in the ground. Research shows that the permafrost globally contains around 1,700 billion tonnes of carbon, which is around three times as much as is in the atmosphere today.

- Permafrost is like the earth's big freezer that keeps carbon dioxide frozen. When it thaws and greenhouse gases are released, global warming is further strengthened, says Albert Norström.

Scientific alarms about the cryosphere have been coming for a long time. Seven years ago, the UN climate panel IPCC published a special report in the area, where the researchers stated that human emissions cause irreversible changes in the cryosphere.

What is new now is that the researchers have investigated how extensive the changes in the cryosphere are, compared to how it has looked in the last 11,000 years, i.e. since the last ice age. During that period, the climate on earth has been relatively stable, which is seen as a prerequisite for human civilizations to have been able to develop and flourish.

It is this time period – called the Holocene – that scientists use to define the safe planetary boundary for the cryosphere. Now all subsystems in the cryosphere move outside this area.

The risk is now not only that effects that are already seen worsen, but in the worst case that so-called tipping points in the climate system are passed - such as that the large land ice cannot be saved, or that large ocean currents such as the AMOC in the North Atlantic collapse.

Now the researchers are urging the world's political leaders to act quickly to try to slow down the development - not least at the ongoing COP31 climate meeting in Turkey.

- This is a signal directly into the negotiation rooms. We are no longer in a safe space for action. We don't want to be here, says Albert Norström.

Can we get back?