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Swiss glaciers lost 5.5 percent of their volume in the first eight months of 2026, the second-worst annual decline on record, as the Matterhorn lost nearly all snow cover.
Swiss glaciers lost 5.5 percent of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026, the second-biggest annual percentage drop on record, according to the annual monitoring report from the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation.
Swiss Glaciers Lose Record Ice Volume
The loss followed a summer of scorching heatwaves and a winter with little snow. It fell just short of the record 6 percent set in 2022. Since 2021, Switzerland has lost 19.4 percent of its glacier ice in just five years, a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country. The 4,478-metre Matterhorn on the border between Switzerland and Italy had lost nearly all of its snow cover by late September after an exceptionally hot summer and warm autumn.
Experts say it is unusual for the peak to be snow-free at this time of year. Geomorphologist Jan Blöthe of the University of Freiburg told German outlet Bild that the absence of snow above 4,000 metres at this time of year was highly unusual. Climate change is considered a key factor. According to MeteoSwiss, Switzerland recorded its hottest summer on record in 2026.
Analysis published by MeteoSwiss found the summer half-year from April to September was the hottest and driest since records began in 1864. Matthias Huss, who heads GLAMOS, said: The warming that we are experiencing now can be attributed 100 per cent to anthropogenic climate change. It is as simple as that.
Huss said many people do not realise how fast glaciers are retreating, or that just one generation ago some now-barren sites used to sit beneath hundreds of metres of ice. Scientists have not yet compiled a formal tally of lost glaciers this year but said they had witnessed the death of a number of small ones.
Moonlike Landscapes Replace Extensive Glaciers
Huss said: I visited one last week and it is so impressive to stand in this moonlike landscape where there was a big layer of ice, an extensive glacier, just a few years ago. And now it is a rock desert where there are some scattered blocks of old ice still lying around and melting on the hot rocks.
The report found the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 metres and 4 metres in 2026, with a reduction of up to 10 metres on the tongue of some glaciers. Huss said scientists were increasingly seeing glaciers collapse from the inside, the result of internal streams beneath the ice that excavate caverns, rather than simply retreating from surface heat. He said: You have huge holes like cheese in the middle of the ice that have collapsing roofs.
These are processes that tear the glaciers apart and make them retreat even faster. The ice loss of 2.2 trillion litres from July to September amounts to four times the annual water consumption of Switzerland, a country of about 9.1 million people. Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average from the heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel pollution and the destruction of nature, with Alpine regions experiencing some of the most dramatic changes.
In that time, humanity has filled the atmosphere with 1.8 trillion tons of carbon dioxide and heated the planet by about 1.4C. The heat this summer was worse than in 2022 but Swiss ice loss just missed the record-breaking levels set that year. The scientists attributed this to limited deposits of Saharan dust, which foul the snow and prevent it from reflecting sunlight, as well as slightly greater snow cover at the end of winter and more sunlight in the summer.
Historical Data Contextualizes Current Ice Loss
The 2022 record retreat came when summer heat, low winter snowfall and an unusual smattering of reddish dust blown in from the Sahara darkened the glaciers and caused them to absorb more heat. In Switzerland, the absolute volume loss has been lower than in 2003, but the percentage decline this year is greater because the total volume today is roughly a third of that 23 years ago. Back then, the relative loss was 3.5 percent of total ice volume.
Huss explained the importance of snow cover: On the one hand, it protects the bare ice from melting. The longer you have snow, the longer you avoid the loss of old ice.
On the other hand, the snow is important also for generating new food for the glacier. The more snow you have, the higher the potential to keep some of the snow at high elevation and to form new ice. The Allalin, Clarident, Rhone and Aletsch glaciers, with Aletsch being the largest in the Alps, were among the glaciers to experience their biggest melt on record this year.
The Plattalvafirn, or Griess glacier, in September, which used to cover a mountain flank, lost 99 percent of its area in just 20 years. It was the subject of some of the most detailed monitoring in the world in the 1950s and Huss worked with its data when he was a PhD student. Huss said: What was different at that time, is that the rates of retreat were still kind of at a normal level.
What we are seeing now is a complete explosion of these melt rates, leading to the disintegration of glaciers. They are really just falling apart. The expert teams have fanned out to assess runoff and crevices caused by running water through the glaciers, in part by dumping red dye into streams to track water flow. The accelerated ice melt has had an impact in Switzerland, where more than half of electricity comes from hydropower.
Melting Glaciers Impact European Water Supply
But the impact ripples far beyond: Switzerland is the water tower of Europe, feeding some of the continent's most important rivers, the Danube, Po, Rhine and Rhone. Europe's legendary Alps are not the only places experiencing a great thaw. Experts say global warming helped to destabilise a Himalayan slope that collapsed in August and unleashed catastrophic and deadly flooding across Nepal.
Satellites have shown vast shrinkage of glaciers in places such as Greenland and Antarctica over the last half-century or so.
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GuardianAus:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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