Swiss glaciers have suffered a near-record loss of ice in 2026, new data shows, as intense summer heatwaves take their toll on Alpine peaks. More than 5% of the country's remaining glacier ice has disappeared in the last 12 months, which scientists say is extraordinary. The reduction in ice volume brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%, according to the annual monitoring report.
Until recently, glaciologists in the Alps considered 2% of ice lost in a single year to be extreme. This year's loss falls just shy of the 2022 record, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. Scientists warn that such rapid melting is no longer a surprise given the pace of climate change, but it could threaten water supplies for farming, hydropower and transport in the decades ahead.
The loss of glacier ice can also destabilise mountain slopes and increase the risk of landslides in some places, which can lead to flash flooding in extreme cases, as seen in Nepal in August. Scientists say long-term glacier thinning and the thawing of frozen ground likely raised the risks in that event.
Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose large white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say. The notable finding from this latest report is not so much that Swiss glaciers are shrinking—which is to be expected in a warming climate driven primarily by fossil fuel emissions—but the sheer pace of melting.