Extreme weather accelerates melting of glaciers in Alps

Several years of extreme weather, including high temperatures in summer and little snowfall in winter, have accelerated the melting of glaciers in Europe's Alps. There used to be about 1,500 glaciers in Switzerland.

However, the temperature of the Alps has increased every year due to global warming, and the number of glaciers in the country has been greatly reduced. The country's glaciers lost a third of their total ice mass between 2001 and 2022, according to Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS), a research group established in the 19th century.

Matthias Huss, head of Glacier Monitoring, Switzerland said "We saw that Swiss glaciers have lost a lot of ice in recent years. And we have also seen that the frequency of extreme years has increased. So we had extreme years earlier already, but this happened very rarely. But nowadays almost every year is an extreme year where we see a lot of melting. And the top of this was reached in the summer of 2022, when Swiss glaciers lost about 6 percent of their total volume. So this was an absolute record that we didn't thought it would be possible."

GLAMOS takes measurements twice a year, in April and September, to monitor the condition of Swiss glaciers.