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When will your glacier disappear? From projections to reality
New website maps the future of every glacier on Earth
When will the glacier in your valley disappear? Will the glacier you visited as a child still exist in 2050? And how much difference would limiting global warming make?
Scientists have launched the Global Glacier Extinction Explorer, a new interactive website that allows anyone to explore the projected future of individual glaciers around the world. By zooming in on www.glacierextinction.com, users can investigate whether, and approximately when, a glacier is projected to disappear under different levels of global warming.
The platform builds on a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, led by researchers from ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel together with an international research team. The study provided the first global assessment of the disappearance of individual glaciers and showed that the world is approaching a period of unprecedented glacier extinction. The website was developed by lead author Lander Van Tricht (ETH Zurich / VUB) together with Kristof Van Tricht (VITO Remote Sensing), translating the scientific projections into an accessible interactive map.
“Global numbers such as glacier mass or area loss can feel very abstract. With this website, people can zoom into their own valley or mountain region and see what different levels of global warming could mean for the glaciers they know,” says Lander Van Tricht. “We hope it can also help local communities prepare for a future with fewer glaciers.”
The launch comes at another difficult moment for European glaciers. 2026 is once again proving to be a particularly bad year for glaciers in the European Alps. Final end-of-summer measurements are still ongoing, but preliminary observations suggest that 2026 could become one of the worst years for Alpine glaciers since systematic measurements began. A combination of low winter snow accumulation and several summer heatwaves has resulted in substantial ice loss across the Alps. For the smallest glaciers, another extreme melt season can be enough to push them beyond the threshold of survival.
One example is Bella Tola Glacier near Saint-Luc in Switzerland, which was officially declared extinct in August 2026 after almost completely disappearing. Strikingly, this closely matches the projections presented in the Nature Climate Change study: Bella Tola was projected to disappear between 2026 and 2029. Urirotstock Glacier was also declared extinct this summer, providing another tangible example of the rapid disappearance of Switzerland’s smallest glaciers.
“These examples make the concept of glacier extinction very concrete,” says Van Tricht. “Our projections showed that many small Alpine glaciers are approaching the end of their lives, and we are now witnessing this process in real time. Bella Tola is particularly striking, as its observed disappearance falls directly within the extinction window projected by our models.”
While extreme melt seasons can mark the final step in a glacier’s decline, the underlying process typically develops over much longer timescales.
“The disappearance of a glacier is not the result of a single warm summer, but the culmination of decades of cumulative mass loss. Year after year, insufficient snowfall and strong summer melt gradually reduce a glacier until it can no longer sustain itself,” adds co-author Harry Zekollari (VUB). “Extreme melt years such as 2022 or 2026 can, however, accelerate this final stage.”
Thousands of glaciers could disappear every year
The underlying Glacier Extinction study relied on recent projections from free global glacier models, published The Cryosphere by Zekollari and colleagues (2024), to determine how many glaciers could disappear, where and when. It introduced the concept of peak glacier extinction: the period when the annual number of disappearing glaciers reaches its maximum.
Under +1.5°C of global warming, around 2,000 glaciers per year are projected to disappear globally at peak extinction, roughly doubling under +4°C. By 2100, nearly half of today’s glaciers could remain at +1.5°C, compared with about 20% at +2.7°C and fewer than 10% at +4°C. These global numbers mask strong regional contrasts: in the European Alps, only around 110 glaciers may remain under +2.7°C warming, and as few as 20 under +4°C.
“Every fraction of a degree matters,” says Van Tricht. “Limiting warming to 1.5°C could preserve more than twice as many glaciers as a 2.7°C trajectory by 2100.”
Making glacier loss local
Glaciers are more than large ice masses. They shape landscapes and ecosystems, contribute to water resources and tourism, and often have strong cultural and emotional significance for local communities. The new website therefore brings global projections back to the scale at which glacier loss is ultimately experienced: the individual glacier. Users can search for any glacier in the world and explore how their projected lifetime changes under different warming scenarios. The extinction years should not be interpreted as exact predictions: individual glaciers respond differently depending on their size, elevation, geometry and local climate, while future warming itself remains uncertain. Instead, the projections provide an estimate of when a glacier is likely to disappear and how strongly that timing depends on future warming.
“Behind every disappearing glacier is a place, a history and often a community that will experience its absence,” says Van Tricht. “The fact that some of the glaciers projected to disappear in our study are already vanishing today shows that glacier extinction is not a distant, end-of-century problem. It is happening now.”
Explore the future of the world's glaciers:
www.glacierextinction.com
Reference
Van Tricht, L., Zekollari, H., Huss, M., Rounce, D. R., Schuster, L., Aguayo, R., Schmitt, P., Maussion, F., Tober, B., and Farinotti, D. (2026). Peak glacier extinction in the mid-21st century. Nature Climate Change 16, 143–147 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02513-9
Zekollari, H., Huss, M., Schuster, L., Maussion, F., Rounce, D.R., Aguayo, R., Champollion, N., Compagno, L., Hugonnet, R., Marzeion, B., Mojtabavi, S., Farinotti, D. (2024), Twenty-first century global glacier evolution under CMIP6 scenarios and the role of glacier-specific observations, The Cryosphere 18, 5045–5066, doi: 10.5194/tc-18-5045-2024
Contact
Lander Van Tricht – vantricht@vaw.baug.ethz.ch, lander.van.tricht@vub.be tel. available on demand
Koen Stein
