Before and after images show glaciers vanishing before our eyes. Until recently, glaciologists in the Alps used to consider 2% of ice lost in a single year to be “extreme”. Then 2022 blew that idea out of the water, with nearly 6% of Switzerland’s remaining ice lost in a single year.

1 comment

1. When Matthias Huss first visited Rhône Glacier in Switzerland 35 years ago, the ice was just a short walk from where his parents would park the car.

   “When I first stepped onto the ice… there [was] a special feeling of eternity,” says Matthias.

   Today, the ice is half an hour from the same parking spot and the scene is very different.

   “Every time I go back, I remember how it used to be,” recalls Matthias, now director of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS), “how the glacier looked when I was a child.”

   There are similar stories for many glaciers all over the planet, because these frozen rivers of ice are retreating – fast.

   In 2024, glaciers outside the giant ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica lost 450 billion tonnes of ice, according to a recent World Meteorological Organization report.

   That’s equivalent to a block of ice 7km (4.3 miles) tall, 7km wide and 7km deep – enough water to fill 180 million Olympic swimming pools.

   “Glaciers are melting everywhere in the world,” says Prof Ben Marzeion of the Institute of Geography at the University of Bremen. “They are sitting in a climate that is very hostile to them now because of global warming.”

Comments are closed.