Snow and
ice on Swiss glaciers melting at alarming rate amid heatwave, expert says
Accumulation
on Switzerland’s glaciers from last winter expected to all be gone by Monday
amid ‘enormous’ melt rates across Alps
Agence
France-Presse
Sat 27
Jun 2026 03.50 BST
Swiss
glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice due to the heatwave
battering Europe, according to the head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland
(Glamos).
The snow
and ice accumulated last winter by Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have
all melted away by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on
record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day.
All
further melting between now and October will see the size of glaciers in the
Swiss Alps shrink.
In data
going back to 2000, the only time that the tipping point arrived even earlier
was in 2022, when it came on 26 June. The grim scenario is driven by the
current heatwave, as well as the one in May – both coming on the back of
another winter with poor snowfall.
“We’re
just seeing enormous ablation, ice melt rates and snow melt rates all over the
Alps,” Glamos network chief Matthias 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.”
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 said
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”.
“It’s
very impressive to see, and this is just the effect of the heatwave.”
“The more
days that are added that are very high temperatures, not even mattering whether
it’s 35C or 40C, this is just very bad for the glaciers.”
Huss said
the “very bad state of the glaciers at the moment” was down 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”.
He said
this year had seen 25% less snow replenishing the surface of the glaciers
compared with the 2010-20 figures. Meanwhile May was warm, causing the snowpack
to disappear earlier.
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.”
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