MOUNTAIN GLACIERS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

MOUNTAINS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

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Jakobshavn retreat from 1851 to 2006Climate change seems to be having a more profound impact on higher elevations than lower elevations the same ways it seems to a more profound affect on higher latitudes than lower latitudes. Temperatures are increasing at upper elevations. Vegetation that formality could not survive there has appeared. Taller plants are crowding out shorter tundra and high altitude plants

The higher elevations of Africa, the Andes mountains in South America, and the Alps in Europe are warming at a faster pace than lowlands. Forests are creeping up to higher elevations along with disease-carrying insects. Above-average melting was observed in Switzerland in 2019, where glaciers there lost 800 million tons of ice during the heat waves of June and July. Alaska also saw record sea-ice melt in July. The flamboyant Chinese multimillionaire Mou Qizhong suggested blasting a 30-mile hole in the Himalayas to let in warm air.

Climate change could cause earlier spring melts disrupting water management and releasing water before people in the lowlands are ready. While climate change can increase melting it can also increase evaporation and produce snow-generating clouds.

A study by scientist at the University of Arizona of tree species and desert plants in the mountains of southern California that the plants there had moved up an elevations of 60 meters over the last 30 years. Many plants flower a week earlier in Europe than they did 50 years and shed their leaves five days earlier.

Importance of Mountain Glaciers

Warming Norway mountains, new plants growing at higher elevations Shrinking glaciers are a problem for millions of people who rely on seasonal glacial melt for daily water. More than 1 billion people live in river basins fed by glacier or snow melt. The shrinkage of glaciers could significantly affect water supplies. The loss of glaciers could also seriously diminish hydropower, This doesn’t bode well for Europe, which generates 20 percent of its electricity through hydropower, and for countries down river from the Himalayas which hope to tape power from rivers fed by Himalayan glaciers.

In many river systems seasonal snow melt is a more important determinant of water supply than glacier and people that live along these rivers and rely on hydropower provided by them are more worried about weather and precipitation changes associated with with climate change than are about retreating glaciers. Rapid melting can cause deadly outbursts from glacial lakes in places like India, Nepal and Tajikistan

The vast amount of water stored in Himalayan glaciers plays a crucial role in river flows, hydropower generation and agricultural run in the Ganges, Yangtze, Mekong and Indus river systems in Asia and elsewhere. J. Madeleine Nash wrote in Smithsonian magazine, “The loss of high-mountain ice in the Himalayas could have terrible consequences for people living downstream. Glaciers function as natural water towers. It's the ice melt in spring and fall that sends water coursing down streams and rivers before the summer monsoon arrives and after it leaves. At present, too much ice is melting too fast, raising the risk of catastrophic flooding; the long-term concern is that soon there will be too little ice during those times when the monsoon fails, leading to drought and famine. [Source: J. Madeleine Nash, Smithsonian magazine, July 2007]

Climate Change and Melting Glaciers

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking. Many blame climate change, which seems to be causing more snowfall in the winter but more melting in the summer. Glaciers have almost vanished from Africa and Papua New Guinea

In the Caucasus half of all glaciers have disappeared in the last 100 years. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s ice cap has shrunk by half in the last 40 years and by 80 percent in the last 100 years. By some estimates it could be ice free in as little as 15 years. Glaciers in the some parts of the Alps and the Andes are shrinking at an alarming rate and some worry they could disappear in the coming decade.

In the 1980s and 1990s glaciers in the Alps have been melting faster but ice covers in Scandinavia, Greenland, Iceland and New Zealand have been growing. In 2008, a total of 70 Swiss glaciers were retreating and five were advancing according to the Swiss Glacier Monitoring network. The Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps and a major water source for the Rhine, has been retreating for about 150 years yet it still holds 27 million tons of ice, enough to fill 12 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

Run off from melting glaciers and ice caps is raising sea levels by 1.2 centimeters a year. Estimates vary but glacier and mountain caps could contribute 70 centimeters to global sea levels if they were all to melt. The melting of glaciers isn’t necessarily tied to climate change. Scientists say it can take decades for a glacier to respond to warming and that melting is occurring is still partly the warming after the Little Age from 1450 to 1890.

The number of glaciers in Glacier National Park in the United States has dropped from 150 in 1910 to 30 today and most of the remaining ones have shrunk by two thirds. Glaciers in the park are disappearing so quickly they could be gone by 2030. J. Madeleine Nash wrote in Smithsonian magazine, “Worldwide, a massive loss of ice... is now in progress, from Alaska to Patagonia, from the Rockies to the Alps. Even more disturbing, the great ice sheets that cover West Antarctica and Greenland are showing signs of instability. The mile-deep Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to raise sea level by something like 20 feet, and while no one expects all that ice to disappear suddenly, it's clear that its accelerating loss will contribute to rising oceans. [Source: J. Madeleine Nash, Smithsonian magazine, July 2007]

Glacier thickness

Shrinking glaciers are not the case everywhere. In the 1980s and 1990s glaciers in Scandinavia, Greenland, Iceland and New Zealand were growing. In Alaska some are shrinking but others are stable. Some scientists say the melting of glaciers isn’t necessarily tied to climate change. Scientists say it can take decades for a glacier to respond to warming and that melting is occurring is still partly the warming after the Little Age from 1450 to 1890.

Quickening Pace of Glacier Melting

Many glaciers are melting rapidly with the pace having picked up in the few decades according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich. Data released in the mid 2000s indicated that mountain glaciers were melting 1.6 times faster than they were in the 1990s. Some glaciers, such as in the Himalayas, could hold out for centuries in a warmer world. But more than 90 percent of glaciers worldwide are in retreat, with major losses already seen across much of Alaska, the Alps, the Andes and numerous other ranges, according to researchers in the USA and Europe as reported by AP. Some scientist predict that smaller glaciers in the Alps will disappear and large ones will be reduced 30 percent to 70 percent.

Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, told Smithsonian magazine, “"What really stands out is how unusual the last 50 years have been compared to at least the last 2,000 and perhaps the last 5,000 years." Rising temperatures are rapidly reducing the ice that permanently caps high mountains around the world. Well before the end of this century, much, and in some areas most of it, will be gone. The loss is a harbinger of even larger, potentially catastrophic, consequences.” [Source: J. Madeleine Nash, Smithsonian magazine, July 2007]

World's Mountain Glaciers Melting Faster than Ever

The world's mountain glaciers are melting faster now than in the 2000s, losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers published in a study released April 28, 2021 in the journal Nature. Seth Borenstein of Associated Press wrote: Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year. [Source: Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, April 29, 2021]

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Kilimanjaro glacier retreat “The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and “that’s enormous,” said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study.

“Almost all the world’s glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world. Half the world’s glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada. Alaska’s melt rates are “among the highest on the planet," with the Columbia glacier retreating about 115 feet (35 meters) a year, Hugonnet said. Klinaklini glacier in British Columbia, Canada and the adjacent icefield lost about 15 gigatons of water from 2000-2019 and the rate of loss accelerated over the last five years of the study. According to U.S. National Park Service research Exit Glacier in Seward, Alaska, which has retreated approximately 1.25 miles over the past 200 years.

“The near-uniform melting “mirrors the global increase in temperature” and is from the burning of coal, oil and gas, Hugonnet said. Some smaller glaciers are disappearing entirely. Two years ago, scientists, activists and government officials in Iceland held a funeral for a small glacier. “Ten years ago, we were saying that the glaciers are the indicator of climate change, but now actually they’ve become a memorial of the climate crisis,” said World Glacier Monitoring Service Director Michael Zemp, who wasn’t part of the study.

“The study is the first to use this 3D satellite imagery to examine all of Earth’s glaciers not connected to ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic. Past studies either only used a fraction of the glaciers or estimated the loss of Earth’s glaciers using gravity measurements from orbit. Those gravity readings have large margins of error and aren't as useful, Zemp said.

Unbelievably, Swiss Glaciers Lose a Fifth of Their Mass in Five Years

Swiss glaciers lost 5.5 percent of their total ice volume in 2026, marking the second-largest annual loss on record, according to the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) network. The decline followed a winter with little snowfall and a summer in which June, July and August each set temperature records dating back to 1864. Between 2022 and 2026, the rate of glacier melting was more than twice that recorded during any previous five-year monitoring period. Switzerland’s glaciers lost nearly 20 percent of their ice volume over the five years beginning in 2022, according to GLAMOS. Matthias Huss, head of the monitoring network, described 2026 as a catastrophic year for the country’s glaciers. [Source: Elodie Le Maou with Agnes Pedrero in Geneva, AFP, October 1, 2026]

Measurements showed that many glaciers lost substantial thickness during the summer. On the Scex Rouge glacier, at an altitude of nearly 3,000 meters (9,840 feet), a four-meter-long measuring stake that had been fully embedded in the ice when installed in late July protruded more than three meters above the glacier’s surface by the time it was examined again. The protective snow cover had partially disappeared during June’s heatwaves and was gone by September, even at high elevations. Some glaciers lost an average of 2.5 to 4 meters (8 to 13 feet) of ice thickness, while exposed glacier tongues lost as much as 10 meters (33 feet). Researchers had to reposition measuring stakes at some sites because the ice beneath them had melted away.

Kilimanjaro glacier retreatAlthough Swiss glaciers have been shrinking for decades, the rate of ice loss has accelerated. GLAMOS reported that Switzerland lost about 10 percent of its glacier ice volume between 1990 and 2000, compared with 27 percent over the decade preceding 2026. The monitoring network based its 2026 assessment on detailed measurements at 23 reference glaciers and used the results to estimate changes across nearly 1,300 glaciers in Switzerland. The annual loss was not greater than the record set in 2022, partly because many glaciers accumulated more snow before the 2026 summer melting season than they did four years earlier. Less dust from the Sahara Desert also settled on the glaciers, allowing more sunlight to be reflected rather than absorbed.

Four major glaciers experienced record melting in 2026, including the Rhône Glacier and the Aletsch Glacier, the largest in the Alps. The continued retreat of these glaciers has raised concerns about future water supplies because they store freshwater that is gradually released into rivers during warmer months. Between July and September 2026, Swiss glaciers lost an estimated 2.2 trillion liters of water, equivalent to more than four times the annual freshwater consumption of Swiss households. GLAMOS warned that Alpine glaciers could not survive over the long term under such conditions. Scientists have identified rising temperatures and declining protective snow cover as major factors accelerating glacier loss across the Swiss Alps.

Water Supplies From Glaciers May Peak Sooner Than Expected

The world’s glaciers contain less ice than previously estimated, raising concerns that freshwater supplies from melting glaciers could peak sooner than expected for millions of people who depend on them for drinking water, irrigation, and other needs. A study published in Nature Geoscience used satellite images collected in 2017 and 2018 to produce more detailed estimates of glacier volume worldwide. The findings suggested that some regions could lose their glacier-derived water supplies faster than earlier projections indicated. Because the analysis represents a snapshot in time, further research is needed to determine how the revised estimates relate to long-term changes in glacier volume and meltwater availability. [Source: Raymond Zhong, The New York Times, February 8, 2022]

The study found substantial regional differences in glacier ice volume. Glaciers in the tropical Andes of South America contained an estimated 27 percent less ice than previously believed, while glaciers in parts of Russia and northern Asia contained about 35 percent less. Worldwide, the study estimated that glaciers contained approximately 11 percent less ice than earlier assessments indicated. However, glaciers in the high mountains of Asia contained about 37 percent more ice than previously estimated, while glaciers in Patagonia and the central Andes contained approximately 10 percent more. The researchers used a more detailed digital reconstruction of the world’s approximately 215,000 glaciers to calculate their dimensions.

The research was led by Romain Millan, a geophysicist at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France. He and his colleagues analyzed more than 811,000 satellite images to measure how quickly glacier surfaces moved across the landscape. Although glaciers may appear stationary, they constantly flow downhill under their own weight and deform as they move. Their speed provides clues about their thickness because thicker glaciers generally exert greater pressure and tend to flow differently from thinner ones. High-resolution satellite imagery allowed researchers to identify variations in glacier thickness, including narrow depressions in the underlying terrain, and map some small ice caps in South America, Europe, and New Zealand that had not previously been mapped in detail.

Despite these advances, scientists still lack reliable measurements for many glaciers, particularly in remote mountain regions. Only a few thousand glaciers worldwide have been measured directly in the field. In the Himalayas, logistical and political difficulties limit scientific monitoring and the exchange of information between countries. Anjal Prakash, a water expert at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, noted that glacier melt supplies nearly half the river flow in the upper Indus basin, which extends across Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan. Approximately 1.5 billion people benefit from the water and other resources of the Himalayas, while the region also faces risks from severe flooding. Scientists warn that changes in glacier volume and meltwater flows could have major consequences for communities dependent on these rivers.

Glacier retreat is already affecting landscapes and livelihoods in North America, Europe, New Zealand, and other regions. As glaciers melt, they contribute to rising sea levels. The study estimated that glaciers worldwide could eventually raise sea levels by about 10 inches (25 centimeters), less than the approximately 12 inches (30 centimeters) or more estimated in earlier assessments. This contribution would be smaller than the potential long-term effects of melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Researchers emphasized that improved satellite observations are helping scientists make more accurate regional predictions of glacier volume and water availability. However, the overall outlook remains that glaciers will lose substantial amounts of ice during this century as global temperatures rise, reducing the amount of meltwater available in many regions over time.

Shortage of Data and Problems Studying Melting Glaciers

Only about 100 glaciers globally are monitored with regular “mass-balance” measurements that reflect how much glaciers grow and retreat from one year to the next. Veteran glaciologist Ian Allison told Reuters, “We probably know less about the total volume of glaciers than we do about the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica because a lot of it is in small mass areas and a lot of it is inaccessible.” Most of the ones that are observed are monitored by the Switzerland-based World Glacier Monitoring Service.

Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Science Academy, told Reuters, “There is no serious information on the state of melting in the glaciers in the Himalaya-Tibetan complex.” The high altitude and remoteness of the glaciers makes studying them difficult. To help fill in the gap, the Indian government recently established the National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology in Debra Dun, northern India.

But even with that there is shortage of glaciologists. Of 30 to 40 Indians who gained a glaciology PhD in the past 20 years, only one is still working in the field — and that is Dr Shresth Tayal. When he took 15 of his students up to Rathong he had to turn back early because 14 developed health problems. TERI has now enlisted the help of the army-run Himalayan Mountaineering Institute to train students, and to provide the logistics on field trips.

Another problem was selecting the benchmark glaciers, which had to be small enough to study, relatively accessible and representative of all Himalayan micro-climates. It chose Rathong for the eastern Himalayas, Chotta Shigri in Himachal for the central section, and Kolahoi in Kashmir for the west. The challenge then was to get the equipment on the glaciers, a particularly tricky task in politically-sensitive borders along India, Pakistan, Nepal and China. Dr Tayal also has to take all his equipment on foot, in much the same way as the British explorers in the 19th century.

Image Sources: World Meteorological Organization; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: World Meteorological Organization; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Yomiuri Shimbun, The Guardian, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated October 2026