Swiss glaciers will lose a large amount of ice due to the heat wave hitting Europe, the head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) told AFP.
The snow and ice accumulated last winter on Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have all melted by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day.
Any further melting between now and October will see the glaciers in the Swiss Alps shrink in size.
In records going back to 2000, the only time the tipping point came earlier was in 2022, when it came on June 26.
The gloomy scenario has been fueled by the current heat wave, as well as May’s – both of which come after another winter with poor snowfall.
“We are only seeing massive ablation, ice melt rate and snow melt rate across the Alps,” GLAMOS network chief Matthias Huss told AFP on Friday, as multiple Swiss weather stations recorded new all-time records.
“We’re three months too early to a healthy state.”
This century, the tipping point, on average, has been reached in mid-August—already bad news for the country’s glaciers, which are shrinking at an alarming rate.
– Glaciers in ‘very bad condition’ –
Most of the water that flows into the Rhine and Rhone, two of Europe’s major rivers, comes from Alpine glaciers.
Huss said he had just returned from the Rhone Glacier and in the 10 days since his previous visit, “there was a meter of ice melting vertically – a meter of melting in just the last 10 days”.
“It’s very impressive to see, and this is just the effect of the heat wave.”
But, Huss said, “a heat wave alone is not a big problem for glaciers.”
“The problem is rather that we have very high temperatures that last for a very long time.
“The more days that are added that are very high temperatures, no matter if it’s 35 or 40 degrees Celsius, that’s very bad for the glaciers.”
Huss said the “very poor state of the glaciers at the moment” was due to a “combination of bad circumstances”, including less snowfall and the arrival of dust from the Sahara desert in March.
He said 2026 was “remarkably similar” to 2022, which for glaciers was “the most extreme year ever recorded in the Alps, with melt rates breaking anything we’ve seen before”.
– Melting –
He said there was 25 percent less snow replenishing the surface of the glaciers this year compared to 2010-2020 figures.
Meanwhile, May was warm, causing the snowpack to disappear earlier.
Once the reflective blanket of white winter snow is removed from the top of the glacier, the darker, more absorbent gray surface of the bare ice is exposed.
This absorbs radiation more quickly, meaning that extreme melting produces an accelerating feedback effect, making the situation even worse.
While the full extent of this year’s damage will be measured in September, “it is already clear that we will have very strong ice losses this year as well.”
The glaciers in the Swiss Alps began to retreat about 170 years ago.
The retreat was initially modest, but in recent decades, melting has accelerated significantly as the climate warms.
The volume of Swiss glaciers shrank by 38 percent between 2000 and 2024.
Huss said Switzerland had already lost 1,200 glaciers in the past 50 years, and now only 1,300 remain.
“The ones that were lost were the small glaciers, but they were still important in the peripheral regions of the Alps,” the glaciologist said.
“If warming continues as it has over the past few decades, by 2100 we will be left with only a few small remnants of ice.”
