Swiss glaciers lose 5.5 percent of their ice in a year, just short of the 2022 record

Swiss glaciers lost an estimated 5.5 percent of their remaining ice in the year to the end of summer 2026, the second-largest annual drop on record, just short of 2022. Glacier Monitoring Switzerland, working with the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation, put the five-year loss since 2021 at 19.4 percent. Until recently the same glaciologists treated a 2 percent loss in a single year as extreme.

Matthias Huss, director of Glacier Monitoring Switzerland, called the year disastrous. He said that at some glaciers the team measured four metres of ice loss at the highest point, where several metres of winter snow should still have been sitting. Even at 3,500 metres above sea level, the surveys found no snow left at the end of summer. Mean thickness on individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 and 4 metres.

Why 2026 did not break the 2022 mark

The summer heat was worse than in 2022. The ice loss still came in just under that year's record. The monitoring group gave three reasons. Saharan dust, which darkens snow and cuts the amount of sunlight it reflects, was limited this year. Snow cover at the end of winter was slightly greater than in the record year. Summer sunlight, as distinct from temperature, was also a factor in the comparison. The result is a near-record melt in a year that was, on temperature alone, harsher than the record year. The dust and the late-winter snow are what kept it from going past 2022.

The winter that fed this summer was poor in snow across much of the Alps. Without a thick spring snowpack, rock and old ice were exposed earlier, and once exposed they absorbed heat that snow would have reflected. Huss described high glacier basins that used to hold firn through August and now show scattered blocks of old ice on bare rock. The Guardian's account of the same report used his comparison of those basins to a rock desert.

The water that came out

Between July and September the glaciers released about 2.2 trillion litres of meltwater. That flow eased shortages in a hot summer. It is also water that will not be stored for a dry August in a later year. Huss's warning on that point is specific: smaller glaciers can no longer top up rivers and reservoirs the way they did when the ice was thicker. A 5.5 percent volume loss in one year, on top of 19.4 percent in five, is the rate at which that buffer shrinks.

The front of the Morteratsch Glacier in south-eastern Switzerland was among the sites the monitoring teams used to show warm air and meltwater working on the same ice. The Rhone and the Aletsch system, the largest in the Alps, are in the same annual account. The report is a national volume figure, not a single-glacier obituary. The local measurement that travels is the four metres gone at the top, where the seasonal snow should have protected the ice underneath.

The monitoring network will publish the full station tables with the annual report. The headline numbers are already the ones water managers will use: 5.5 percent this year, 19.4 percent since 2021, 2.2 trillion litres out between July and September, and no snow left at 3,500 metres when summer ended.