Swiss glaciers are having a very bad time, according to the head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos), who has announced that all the snow and ice accumulated last winter will likely have melted away by Monday. This marks the second-earliest arrival on record of the dreaded “glacier loss day” - a tipping point that, for context, is supposed to happen much later, ideally never.

In data going back to 2000, only 2022 beat this year’s record, when the tipping point arrived on June 26. The culprit? The current heatwave, plus one in May, both following a winter that apparently forgot to snow. “We’re just seeing enormous ablation, ice melt rates and snow melt rates all over the Alps,” Glamos chief Matthias Huss told AFP on Friday, as multiple Swiss weather stations registered new all-time records. “We are three months too early compared to a healthy state.”

This century, the tipping point has on average been reached in mid-August - already bad news for Switzerland’s glaciers, which are shrinking at a staggering rate. The water from these glaciers feeds two of Europe’s major rivers, the Rhine and the Rhone, so this isn’t just an alpine problem.

Huss said he had just returned from the Rhone Glacier and that in the 10 days since his previous visit “there was one metre of ice melted in the vertical direction - one metre of melting within just the last 10 days.” “It’s very impressive to see, and this is just the effect of the heatwave,” he added, in what we assume is a tone of horror rather than admiration.

Huss attributed the “very bad state of the glaciers at the moment” to a “combination of bad circumstances,” including less snowfall and the arrival of dust from the Sahara desert in March. He said 2026 was “surprisingly similar” to 2022, which for glaciers was “by far the most extreme year ever recorded in the Alps, with melt rates shattering everything we had seen before.” This year has seen 25% less snow replenishing the glacier surface compared with the 2010-20 average, and May was warm enough to make the snowpack pack its bags early.

Glaciers in the Swiss Alps began retreating about 170 years ago, initially in a modest way, but in recent decades the melting has accelerated significantly as the climate warms. The volume of Swiss glaciers shrank by 38% between 2000 and 2024. Huss noted that Switzerland has already lost 1,200 glaciers in the past 50 years, leaving only 1,300. “Those lost were small glaciers, but they were still relevant in peripheral regions of the Alps,” he said. “If warming continues as it did over the last decades, by 2100 we will only be left with some little remnants of ice.”