“Very severe ice loss”: researcher says snow reserves on Alpine glaciers could be used up within days

By June 29, this year’s winter snow reserves on the glaciers could already be exhausted, according to Swiss glaciologist Matthias Huss. A Europe-wide heatwave is also taking a toll on glaciers: Huss told AFP that the Alps are expected to suffer “very severe ice loss” this year.

The so-called glacier melt-out day could come as early as June 29, after which the glaciers lose mass as melting continues. So far, this has only happened that early once before, in 2022.

Huss, who heads Switzerland’s glacier monitoring service Glamos, says the main reasons are the current heatwave, the hot spell in May, and another winter with too little snow.

“We are seeing enormous rates of erosion and melting of ice and snow across the entire Alpine region,” he said. The melting is beginning about three months earlier than would be considered healthy for the glaciers.

He said he had just returned from the Rhône Glacier, where over the past ten days the glacier tongue had lost about one meter in vertical height — meaning roughly one meter of ice vanished in just ten days. “It is very impressive to see, and it is solely the result of the heatwave,” he said.

Huss stressed that one heatwave alone is usually not a major problem for glaciers. The real issue is prolonged periods of very high temperatures. “It’s a combination of intensity and duration,” he explained. “The more days we have with very high temperatures, whether 35 or 40 degrees, the worse it is for the glaciers.”

He added that this year’s extremely poor glacier conditions were caused by a “combination of unfortunate circumstances,” including low snowfall in winter and Saharan dust in March. He sees a striking resemblance to 2022, the worst year ever recorded in the Alps for melt rates.

This year, glaciers had about 25% less snow than they did on average between 2010 and 2020, Huss said. May was also unusually warm, causing the snow cover to disappear earlier and exposing the darker glacier ice beneath, which then absorbs more heat and melts faster.

He therefore expects major ice loss even before the annual measurements in September. Looking ahead, he warned that the situation is alarming: Switzerland has tracked 1,200 glaciers that have disappeared over the past 50 years, and only about 1,300 remain today. If warming continues at the same pace as in recent decades, he said, only small remnants of ice will be left by 2100.