Swiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice and snow due to the heatwave battering Europe, according to Matthias Huss, head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos). The snow and ice accumulated last winter is expected to have all melted away by Monday, marking the second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day.
Alarming melt rates across the Alps
In data going back to 2000, the only time the tipping point arrived earlier was in 2022, when it came on June 26. The grim scenario is driven by the current heatwave and the one in May, both following a winter with poor snowfall. “We’re just seeing enormous ablation, ice melt rates and snow melt rates all over the Alps,” Huss told AFP on Friday, as multiple Swiss weather stations registered new all-time records. “We are three months too early compared to a healthy state.”
Impact on major rivers
This century, the tipping point on average has been reached in mid-August, already bad news for the nation’s glaciers, which are shrinking at a staggering rate. Much of the water that flows into the Rhine and the Rhone, two of Europe’s major rivers, comes from the Alpine glaciers. Huss noted that he had just returned from the Rhone Glacier and that in the 10 days since his previous visit, “there was one metre of ice melted in the vertical direction – one metre of melting within just the last 10 days.” He added, “It’s very impressive to see, and this is just the effect of the heatwave.”
Combination of bad circumstances
Huss attributed the “very bad state of the glaciers at the moment” to a “combination of bad circumstances,” including less snowfall and the arrival of dust from the Sahara desert in March. He said 2026 was “surprisingly similar” to 2022, which for glaciers was “by far the most extreme year ever recorded in the Alps, with melt rates shattering everything we had seen before.” This year has seen 25% less snow replenishing the surface of the glaciers compared with the 2010-20 figures, while May was warm, causing the snowpack to disappear earlier.
Long-term decline
Glaciers in the Swiss Alps began to retreat about 170 years ago, initially modestly, but in recent decades melting has accelerated significantly as the climate warms. The volume of Swiss glaciers shrank by 38% between 2000 and 2024. Huss said Switzerland had already lost 1,200 glaciers in the past 50 years, and now only 1,300 were left. “Those lost were small glaciers, but they were still relevant in peripheral regions of the Alps,” the glaciologist said. “If warming continues as it did over the last decades, by 2100 we will only be left with some little remnants of ice.”
