{"id":470726,"date":"2025-10-03T09:15:28","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T09:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/470726\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T09:15:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T09:15:28","slug":"enormous-melting-sees-swiss-glaciers-shrink-by-3-this-year-the-fourth-biggest-retreat-on-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/470726\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Enormous&#8217; melting sees Swiss glaciers shrink by 3% this year, the fourth-biggest retreat on record"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n  By&amp;nbsp<b>JAMEY KEATEN<\/b>&amp;nbspwith&amp;nbsp<b>AP<\/b>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n         Published on<br \/>\n            02\/10\/2025 &#8211; 9:42 GMT+2\n            <\/p>\n<p>          <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"c-ad__placeholder__logo\" src=\"https:\/\/static.euronews.com\/website\/images\/logos\/logo-euronews-stacked-outlined-72x72-grey-9.svg\" width=\"72\" height=\"72\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\"\/><br \/>\n          ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>Switzerland&#8217;s glaciers have faced \u201cenormous\u201d melting this year with a 3 per cent drop in total volume, the fourth-largest annual drop on record, due to the effects of global warming, top Swiss glaciologists reported Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>The shrinkage this year means that ice mass in Switzerland \u2014 home to the most glaciers in Europe \u2014 has declined by one-quarter over the last decade, the Swiss glacier monitoring group GLAMOS and the Swiss Academy of Sciences said in their report.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/green\/2025\/06\/25\/climate-change-turns-alpine-glaciers-into-swiss-cheese-raising-water-and-power-concerns\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Glacial melting in Switzerland<\/strong><\/a> was once again enormous in 2025,&#8221; the scientists said. \u201cA winter with low snow depth combined with heat waves in June and August led to a loss of 3 per cent of the glacier volume.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Switzerland is home to nearly 1,400 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/green\/2025\/02\/20\/glaciers-are-losing-more-water-each-year-than-the-world-will-consume-in-three-decades-stud\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>glaciers,<\/strong><\/a> the most of any country in Europe, and the ice mass and its gradual melting have implications for hydropower, tourism, farming and water resources in many European countries.<\/p>\n<p>A winter with little snow and a summer of heatwaves<\/p>\n<p>More than 1,000 small glaciers in Switzerland have already disappeared, the experts said.<\/p>\n<p>The teams reported that a winter with little snow was followed by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/green\/2025\/09\/23\/more-than-62000-died-in-europes-2024-heatwave-which-country-was-hit-the-hardest\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>heatwaves<\/strong><\/a> in June \u2014 the second-warmest June on record \u2014 which left the snow reserves depleted by early July. Ice masses began to melt earlier than ever, they said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGlaciers are clearly retreating because of anthropogenic global warming,\u201d said Matthias Huss, the head of GLAMOS, referring to climate change caused by human activity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is the main cause for the acceleration we are seeing in the last two years,\u201d added Huss, who is also a glaciologist at Zurich\u2019s ETHZ university.<\/p>\n<p>The shrinkage is the fourth-largest after those in 2022, 2023 and back in 2003.<\/p>\n<p>The retreat and loss of glaciers is also having an impact on Switzerland&#8217;s landscape, causing mountains to shift and ground to become unstable.<\/p>\n<p>Swiss authorities have been on heightened alert for such changes after a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down a mountainside that covered nearly all of the southern village of Blatten in May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By&amp;nbspJAMEY KEATEN&amp;nbspwith&amp;nbspAP Published on 02\/10\/2025 &#8211; 9:42 GMT+2 ADVERTISEMENT Switzerland&#8217;s glaciers have faced \u201cenormous\u201d melting this year with&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[2311,728,85385,1984,2461,70,2462,2600,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-470726","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-climate-change","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-glaciers","11":"tag-global-warming","12":"tag-heatwave","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-snow","15":"tag-switzerland","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115309480217247575","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}