Thousands of glaciers around the world are set to vanish every year in the coming decades, with the scale of loss hinging on how strongly governments act to curb global warming, according to a new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change.
The research finds that by the middle of the century, between 2,000 and 4,000 glaciers could disappear annually, depending on future temperature rise. By 2100, the difference between limiting warming and allowing it to continue unchecked could mean preserving nearly half of the world’s glaciers or losing more than 90 percent of them.
“Our results underscore the urgency of ambitious climate policy,” said lead author Lander Van Tricht, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
While glacier research often focuses on ice mass and sea-level rise, the team examined how many individual glaciers are likely to disappear each year. Even small glaciers, they noted, play a crucial role in local ecosystems, tourism, and cultural identity.
“The disappearance of each single glacier can have major local impacts, even if its meltwater contribution is small,” Van Tricht said.
Using satellite data covering more than 211,000 glaciers worldwide, the researchers modeled glacier loss under warming scenarios ranging from 1.5°C to 4°C above pre-industrial levels. They introduced the concept of “peak glacier extinction” to describe the year when the highest number of glaciers vanish.
Currently, about 1,000 glaciers disappear annually. Even if warming is limited to 1.5°C the goal set under the Paris Agreement annual losses would peak at around 2,000 glaciers by 2041, leaving just under half of today’s glaciers intact by 2100.
Under existing government policies, which are projected to lead to about 2.7°C of warming, glacier losses could reach roughly 3,000 per year between 2040 and 2060. In that scenario, only one in five glaciers would survive to the end of the century.
In a worst-case 4°C warming scenario, as many as 4,000 glaciers could disappear annually by the mid-2050s, leaving only nine percent remaining by 2100.
The timing of glacier loss will vary by region. Areas dominated by small glaciers, such as the European Alps and the subtropical Andes, could lose half their glaciers within two decades. Regions with larger ice bodies, including Greenland and parts of Antarctica, are expected to see peak losses later in the century.
The researchers emphasized that a decline in glacier disappearances toward the end of the century would not signal recovery, but rather the near-total loss of remaining ice in some regions.
“In the Alps, the loss rate will fall to almost zero by 2100,” Van Tricht said, “just because there are almost no glaciers left.”
