Despite snowy winter, Swiss glaciers ‘on track to disappear’: monitor

GLETSCH, Switzerland: A snowy winter provided no respite for Switzerland´s glaciers, which shed 2.4 percent of their volume in a year, with Sahara sand accelerating the summer melt.

The past 12 months have been “exceptional both in terms of accumulation and melt” for Swiss glaciers, a Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) study showed on Tuesday.

In the end, the glacier melt, which scientists say is being accelerated by human-induced climate change, was less dramatic this year than over the previous two years, when Swiss glaciers lost more than 10 percent of their volume -- a record.

When disregarding 2022, when 5.9 percent of ice volume in the Swiss Alps was lost, and 2023, when another 4.4 percent melted away, the annual volume loss in recent decades has fluctuated between one and three percent.

The 2.4 percent glacier shrinkage this year was well above the 1.9-percent annual average between 2010 and 2020.

It amounted to a “massive loss of ice again”, GLAMOS head Matthias Huss told AFP.

The glaciers, he warned, “are retreating faster and faster”, and “are on track to disappear”. “They will only be there in 100 years if we manage to stabilise the climate.”

GLAMOS researchers did extensive measurements at 20 glaciers in September, and extrapolated the findings to Switzerland´s 1,400 glaciers.

It determined that Swiss glacier volume will total 46.4 cubic kilometres at the end of this year -- nearly 30 km3 less than in 2000.