\tMore Than Half of Small Glaciers Lost\u00a0<\/p>\n
An international team of researchers led by ETH Zurich, the WSL research institute and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has drawn this and further conclusions in a groundbreaking study that, for the first time, calculates how many glaciers worldwide disappear each year, are likely to remain until the end of the century, and for how long. \u201cFor the first time, we\u2019ve put years on when every single glacier on Earth will disappear,\u201d says Lander Van Tricht, lead author of the study published on 15 December 2025 in Nature Climate Change.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unlike previous research, which mainly focused on global ice mass and surface area loss, the ETH Zurich-led team shifts the spotlight to the number of disappearing glaciers, their regions, and the timeline of their disappearance. Their findings reveal that regions with many small glaciers at lower elevations or near the equator are particularly vulnerable \u2013 including the Alps, the Caucasus, the Rocky Mountains, as well as parts of the Andes and African mountain ranges that lie in low latitudes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn these regions, more than half of all glaciers are expected to vanish within the next ten to twenty years,\u201d says Van Tricht, a researcher at ETH Zurich\u2019s Chair of Glaciology and the WSL research institute.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How Many Glaciers in the Alps \u2013 and Worldwide \u2013 Will Survive?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pace of glacier retreat depends on the extent of global warming. For this reason, the researchers ran projections using three state-of-the-art global glacier models and several climate scenarios. For the Alps, they found that with a +1.5\u00b0 C rise, 12 per cent of glaciers would remain by 2100 (roughly 430 out of about 3,000 in 2025); at +2\u00b0 C, around 8 per cent or ca. 270 glaciers would survive \u2013 and at +4\u00b0 C, just 1 per cent, or 20 glaciers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For comparison: In the Rocky Mountains, around 4,400 glaciers would endure under the 1.5\u202f\u00b0C scenario \u2013 about 25 per cent of today\u2019s roughly 18,000 glaciers. At +4\u00b0 C, only about 101 would remain, a 99 per cent loss. In the Andes and Central Asia, about 43 per cent would survive at 1.5\u00b0 C. But at +4\u202f\u00b0C, the numbers plummet: in the Andes, only around 950 glaciers would remain, a 94 per cent loss; in Central Asia, roughly 2,500 glaciers \u2013 a 96 percent decline. Overall, it can be said that in a scenario with a global temperature rise of +4\u00b0 C only about 18,000 glaciers would remain, whereas at +1.5\u00b0 C there would be around 100,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The study also shows that there is no region left where glaciers numbers are not declining. Even in the Karakoram of Central Asia, where some glaciers temporarily grew after the turn of the millennium, glaciers are projected to disappear.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More Than Half of Small Glaciers Lost\u00a0 An international team of researchers led by ETH Zurich, the WSL…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3383,3385,3384,272,1023,51],"class_list":{"0":"post-3807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-zurich","8":"tag-cooperations","9":"tag-d-baug","10":"tag-environmental-engineering","11":"tag-international","12":"tag-sustainability","13":"tag-zurich"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}