This is how fast Swiss glaciers, the 'water tower of Europe,' are melting away

Tourists gather at the glacier-feed Oeschinensee lake near Kandersteg, Switzerland, on Aug. 4. The country's glacier-monitoring service says Switzerland lost the second-highest percentage of glacier ice on record this year. (Hernan Munoz/The Associated Press)Social SharingGlaciers in Switzerland — the home to the most in the Alps — lost 5.5 per cent of their ice volume this year, the second-biggest percentage drop on record due to heat waves and low winter snowfall, experts report.

"Alpine glaciers have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions," the GLAMOS Swiss glacier monitoring service and Swiss Academy of Sciences said in a statement Thursday.

The trend has worsened in recent years. Over the past five years alone, the volume of ice in Switzerland has declined by nearly a fifth, the experts say.

The report testifies to the latest concerns that global warming is wreaking havoc on Europe, the world's fastest-warming continent.

"The warming that we are experiencing now can be attributed 100 per cent to anthropogenic climate change. It's as simple as that," said Matthias Huss, who heads GLAMOS. "Without human emissions or fossil fuels we wouldn't have any warming at the moment."

The record retreat of glacier ice in Switzerland came in 2022, 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.

Huss said the snow cover in winter was important for two reasons.

Matthias Huss, of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and glacier monitoring group GLAMOS, and Monica Ursina Jaeger drill holes into the Rhone Glacier near Goms, Switzerland, June 10, 2025. (Matthias Schrader/The Associated Press)"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," said Huss in an interview at the Federal Polytechnic Institute ETHZ, where he is a glaciology professor.

"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 great thaw in Europe's legendary Alps is not alone: Experts say global warming helped to destabilize a Himalayan slope that collapsed in August and unleashed catastrophic and deadly flooding across Nepal. Satellites have shown vast shrinkage of glaciers in places like Greenland and Antarctica over the last half-century or so.

In Switzerland, in absolute terms, volume lost has been less than that in 2003, but the percentage decline this year is greater. That's because the total volume today is roughly a third of that 23 years ago. Back then, the relative loss was 3.5 per cent of total ice volume in Swiss glaciers.

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Such accelerated ice melt has had an impact in Switzerland — the loss of 2.2 trillion litres from July to September amounts to four times the annual consumption of water in the country of about 9.1 million people. Switzerland gets more than half of its electricity from hydropower.

But the impact of accelerated glacier melt ripples far beyond: Switzerland is the water tower of Europe, and feeds some of the continent's most important rivers: the Danube, Po, Rhine and Rhone.

The experts say the "extreme melting" faced by Switzerland's glaciers this year included a decline in the average thickness of individual glaciers between two and half and four metres — and a reduction of up to 10 metres on the tongue of some glaciers.

The expert teams have fanned out to assess runoff and crevices caused by the running water through the glaciers, in part by dumping red dye into the streams to track the water flows.

The Allalin, Clarident, Rhone and Aletsch glaciers — Aletsch being the largest in the Alps — were among the glaciers to experience their biggest melt on record this year.

"We just need to stabilize the climate by reducing CO2 emissions and this will help the glaciers," said Huss, of GLAMOS, though he added that it is "almost too late" to save those in the Swiss Alps.

"For the ice in the polar regions like the ice sheets, there it's not yet too late," he said. "There, we can make a difference and we need to make a difference in order to limit sea level rise, for example, a factor that is a fundamental threat to billions of people living along the coast."

Glacier on top of Blueemlisalphorn peak seen near Kandersteg, on Aug. 4. (Hernan Munoz/The Associated Press)CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices·About CBC NewsCorrections and clarifications·Submit a news tip·Report errorRelated StoriesAugust was Earth's hottest month, European climate agency findsWildfires, permafrost thaw in Canada causing even more climate change, new study showsClimate change past the point of no return, UN says, as worst impacts are now unavoidableDismaying climate news doesn’t mean the climate fight is overMillions of fish tested Canada's largest nuclear plant. The incident points to a growing climate riskAdd some “good” to your morning and evening.