Glaciers of the world



Climate change is giving Swiss glaciers no respite. In 2025 their volume shrank by 3% compared to the previous year, according to the latest assessment by the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network (GLAMOS) and the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences. This is the largest retreat after those in 2003, 2022 and 2023.



“This year turned out to be a little less extreme than we feared,” says Matthias Huss, director of GLAMOS. “However, what strikes me and worries me is that we’re getting used to these very negative years. It’s a new normal, but one that shouldn’t be there.”



The Alps are warming faster than the global average and Swiss glaciers have lost a quarter of their volume since 2015, GLAMOS points out. Between 2016 and 2022, 100 glaciers – out of a total of about 1,400 – disappeared completely in Switzerland.

The melting of glaciers releases largely unknown bacteria and viruses into the environment. A research team is studying them for the first time in Swiss glaciers, as explained in this video:

Iceland’s glaciers are melting so fast that future generations may wonder how the country got its name. The northern European island nation has lost 70 of its 400 glaciers. In the past 25 years, the total area of Iceland’s ice has shrunk by about a tenth while glacier thickness has dropped by an average of one metre a year, says Hrafnhildur Hannesdóttir of the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO).



“The rate of glacial mass loss is among the highest in the world,” says Hannesdóttir, the national correspondent for the WGMS.



Iceland’s large glaciers such as Mýrdalsjökull, Langjökull and Vatnajökull – the largest in Europe by volume – are retreating by several hundred metres a year. If temperatures continue to rise, Iceland will be virtually ice-free in 200 years.



With peaks exceeding 7,000 meters, Central Asia is home to some of the largest expanses of ice on the planet. The region encompassing the Pamir and Hindu Kush Mountain ranges is known as the “third pole” because, after the Arctic and Antarctic, it is the third largest ice reserve in the world.



Unlike the polar ice caps, some glaciers in the Pamirs, in Tajikistan, seemed immune to rising global temperatures. Over the past thirty years, the former Soviet republic has lost more than a thousand of its approximately 14,000 glaciers, but several remained stable.



However, this exception, known as the “Pamir-Karakoram anomaly,” may have come to an end. “They were the only glaciers in the world in good condition, and some even increased their mass since the early 2000s", says Francesca Pellicciotti, a glaciologist at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA).



These glaciers are a crucial water resource for people and agriculture in the region, especially during the summer months when precipitation is scarce. They provide fresh water to about 80 million people in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

At 8,848 metres, Mount Everest is the highest peak on the planet. But its altitude does not shelter the mountain from the effects of the warming climate. The thickness of the South Col glacier, Everest’s highest, has shrunk by more than 54 metres since the late 1990s.



“Recent studies show that Himalayan glaciers are melting at an accelerated pace,” says Sharad Joshi, a cryosphere expert at the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).



Yala Glacier in Nepal’s Langtang Valley is among the most-studied glaciers in the country. Its area shrank by more than a third between 1974 and 2021External link, and the glacier may disappear in the next 20 to 25 years. “Every time I visit the glacier I feel deep sadness to see its massive loss,” says Joshi, the national correspondent in Nepal for the WGMS.



Africa is famous for its rainforests, savannas, and deserts. These ecosystems cover most of the continent. But Africa is also home to areas that are permanently covered by ice.



East Africa’s glaciers are found near the equator, at elevations above 5,000 metres. The largest are in Tanzania, on Mount Kilimanjaro, the continent’s highest peak. Other glaciers are found on Mount Kenya and in Uganda, on the Rwenzori Mountain range.



Like glaciers around the world, these are melting due to climate change, affecting the people who live at the foot of the mountains as well as the local tourism industry.



"They have lost more than 90% of their area since 1900", says Rainer Prinz, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck. Prinz is the national correspondent for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania for the WGMS. He is the co-author of one of the most recent and comprehensive studies of African glaciers.



In just over a century, the area covered by glaciers in Africa has decreased from 19.5 to 1.4 square kilometres, according to the study. The remaining ice is so diminished that it would cover less than half the area of Central Park in New York City.



“Without significant changes in local climate conditions, East African glaciers are expected to disappear almost entirely by mid-century,” Prinz says.

To the Kogi, an indigenous community in northern Colombia, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria mountain range is the centre of the universe. There, the rivers and forests are part of a living being: the mountain is a body and the glacier its brain. The glaciers melting, the Kogi believe, is a sign of imbalance between humans and nature.



Of the 14 tropical glaciers that existed in Colombia at the beginning of the 20th century, only six remain today. The last to completely melt, the Conejeras Glacier, disappeared just over a year ago.



“We have lost 30% of the glacial surface in the last 12 years,” says Jorge Luis Ceballos Liévano of the Colombian National Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM). Ceballos Liéviano is the national correspondent in Colombia for the WGMS.



Colombia and Ecuador are among the few countries in the world to host tropical glaciers. Unlike Alpine glaciers, tropical glaciers depend on the rainy season. These glaciers are particularly vulnerable to climate change.