Europe warms twice the global average, driving Alpine ice collapse

Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, bringing total ice loss since 2021 to 19.4% — a pace scientists describe as an “explosion of melt rates” that is reshaping the Alpine landscape.

The reduction in ice volume falls just short of the record set in 2022, the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation reported. The findings cap a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow, leaving once-vast white glaciers reduced to “moonlike rock deserts” with scattered blocks of old ice melting on hot rocks, according to lead author Matthias Huss.

“I visited one last week and it’s so impressive to stand in this moonlike landscape where there was a big layer of ice – an extensive glacier – just a few years ago,” Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zürich, said. “And now it’s a rock desert where there’s some scattered blocks of old ice still lying around and melting on the hot rocks.”

The report found that the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 meters and 4 meters in 2026. Huss said scientists are increasingly seeing glaciers collapse from the inside — the result of internal streams beneath the ice that excavate caverns — rather than simply retreating from surface heat.

“You have huge holes like cheese in the middle of the ice that have collapsing roofs,” Huss said. “These are processes that tear the glaciers apart and make them retreat even faster.”

Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average, driven by the heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel combustion and the destruction of nature, with Alpine areas experiencing some of the most dramatic changes on the continent.

Analysis published by MeteoSwiss on Tuesday found that the summer half-year from April to September was the hottest and driest since records began in 1864. Since then, the planet has accumulated about 1.8 trillion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and warmed by approximately 1.4 degrees Celsius.

Although the 2026 heat exceeded that of 2022, Swiss ice loss just missed the record set that year. The scientists attributed the near-miss to limited deposits of Saharan dust — which foul the snow and prevent it from reflecting sunlight — as well as slightly greater snow cover at the end of winter and more sunlight during the summer.

Huss visited the former Plattalvafirn, also called the Griess glacier, in September. The glacier, which was the subject of some of the most detailed monitoring in the world in the 1950s and on which Huss worked with data as a PhD student, used to cover a mountain flank but has lost 99% of its area in just 20 years.

“What was different at that time, is that the rates of retreat were still kind of at a normal level,” Huss said. “What we are seeing now is a complete explosion of these melt rates, leading to the disintegration of glaciers. They’re really just falling apart.”

The scientists have not yet compiled a formal tally of glaciers that disappeared entirely in 2026, but said they had witnessed the death of a number of small ones.