An expedition to document the final days of the last tropical glaciers in Oceania has returned with footage that one explorer describes as 'planetary destruction on fast-forward,' which is either a dramatic metaphor or a very literal description of what happens when ice melts really quickly.
The once-mighty ice sheets on Puncak Jaya, a mountain in West Papua, Indonesia, surrounded by dense rainforests, have stubbornly outlived projections that they would vanish by 2026, though 'surviving' is a strong word for something that has shrunk to a fraction of its original size. The larger of the two remaining glaciers - known locally as 'eternal snow' and in English as the 'eternity glaciers' - has lost 95% of its area since 2002, according to the expedition.
'The ice will be gone: it's not a question of if, it's a question of when,' said Klaus Thymann, a Danish explorer and founder of Project Pressure, an environmental charity. 'And 'when' is coming very, very soon.' So soon, in fact, that you might want to book your glacier-viewing trip now, before it becomes a glacier-remembering trip.
Tropical glaciers, mostly found in the Andes but also in East Africa and Indonesia, are rapidly losing mass as fossil fuel pollution heats the planet. Thymann admitted it 'might be weird to have an emotional reaction to an inanimate object,' but documenting the loss left him tearful after filming on a rare morning of clear skies. 'On a philosophical level, you take eternity - something that's an abstract, human construct - and we are even now killing our own constructs,' he said. 'It raises some very interesting questions, I think, around the little speck we are in geological time, and what amount of chaos we've managed to do in such little time.'
The remote Puncak Jaya mountain sits in disputed territory on the island of New Guinea, where decades of conflict followed Indonesia's invasion of the former Dutch colony in 1963. The last two major scientific expeditions to the glaciers took place in 1973 and 2011, so this one was overdue. Accompanied by soldiers and mountain guides during a two-week expedition in November, the team conducted a photogrammetric survey using drones and satellite positioning systems to create a 3D model of the mountain. The near-incessant rain gave them few windows of opportunity with enough visibility to capture useful images, which is ironic given that they were documenting the disappearance of ice in one of the wettest places on Earth.
'What's very healthy about being in the mountains is that it makes you humble, because we can't control the weather,' said Thymann. 'But at the same time, as much as the weather controls what I can do in a mountain, the fact that humanity has changed the weather systems is also almost unfathomable.' He added: 'You really understand that it is planetary destruction on fast-forward. And that's both very scary and sad.'
Papua's tropical glaciers lost 97% of their ice mass between 1980 and 2024, according to a study published last month by Indonesian researchers. Four of its six glaciers have completely disappeared, and they project the final two will be gone by the end of the decade. 'It is deeply saddening,' said Francine Hematang, a researcher at Papua University's forestry faculty and lead author of the study. 'This is the only tropical glacier in Indonesia and south-east Asia, and it continues to shrink at an alarming rate.'
A separate study published in December used satellite imagery and digitised analogue maps to document a decrease of glacier surface area of more than 99% since 1850, and by about 65% since the last survey in 2018. It reached the same conclusion about the impending disappearance, because when multiple studies all say the same thing, it's usually not a coincidence - it's a pattern. David Ibel, a researcher at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg and lead author of that study, noted that expeditions help because satellite surveys are hindered by cloud cover, shadows from rugged topography, and the frequency of satellite passes. Drones with high-resolution cameras, like those Thymann used, can exploit brief cloud-free windows to capture images with extreme precision.
Carbon pollution and nature destruction have heated the planet by about 1.4C since preindustrial times, making it less hospitable to human life. Glaciers are projected to lose a quarter of their global mass by 2100, even in a best-case scenario for cutting emissions, with devastating consequences for drinking water and food security. As well as environmental impacts, the loss for local communities is 'indescribable,' said Ibel. 'It is highly unlikely that the glaciers are going to reappear in the next hundreds of years, meaning an irretrievable loss for many generations to come. It can be only hoped that the disappearance of tropical glaciers underlines the urgency of action against anthropogenic climate change.'
The Puncak Jaya glaciers are located in one of Earth's wettest regions and are strongly influenced by the warming El Niño weather pattern, which was particularly powerful in 2023-24 and is expected to return this year. Thymann said a secondary aim of the expedition, for which Project Pressure partnered with geospatial technology companies Trimble and Pix4D, was to create a 'visual Noah's ark' before the glaciers disappear entirely. 'Believe me, I would much rather there was ice than we had to resort to creating 3D models for future generations.'