GENEVA: Switzerland’s glaciers are melting at an alarming pace this year, with scientists warning that the loss of ice cover began weeks earlier than usual due to a snow-poor winter.
Glacier Loss Day (GLD) is marked every year by researchers in Switzerland. It represents the point when a glacier has melted away all the snow and ice it gained during the winter.
Depending on the glacier, it arrived as early as late June or early July this year.
“In some regions in north-eastern Switzerland, we’ve never had such a small amount of snow on the glaciers at the end of winter”, researcher Andreas Bauder of ETH Zurich said of the mountain conditions going into the summer months. “As long as there is snow on the ground, the ice won’t melt. But this year, the snow melt began at the end of May and continued rapidly throughout June and into July”, he said.
In Switzerland, snow and ice cover are measured in detail every spring and fall on about 20 of the country’s roughly 1,400 glaciers. Between 10 and 15 of those are also monitored during the summer. These observations are used to determine the Glacier Loss Day.
Looking back to last year, the summer began with much larger snow reserves than this year, according to Bauder. Even so, glaciers still lost more mass in 2024 than they gained during the winter, leading them to shrink.
“In the past, Glacier Loss Day usually came at the end of August or early September-but we haven’t seen that in the past 20 years”, said Bauder. — dpa
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