Geneva, Switzerland

The glaciers in Switzerland, this year, suffered their second worst melt rate after record depletion in 2022, lessening their comprehensive volume by 10% in the last two years, a report said on Thursday (Sept 28).

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In 2022, Switzerland's glaciers shed six per cent of their overall volume and this year, they lost another four per cent, "representing the second largest decline since measurements began", the Cryospheric Commission of the Swiss Academy of Sciences found in a new study.

The study further warned that the situation could only worsen in the coming years.

"Swiss glaciers are melting at a rapidly increasing rate," it said in a statement.

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"The acceleration is dramatic, with as much ice being lost in only two years as was the case between 1960 and 1990," it added.

The result of two consecutive extreme years had been collapsing glacier tongues and some smaller glaciers disappearing altogether.

"All glaciers melted a lot," news agency AFP quoted Matthias Huss, head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) as saying.

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"But for the small glaciers, (the) melting is especially dramatic because these small glaciers are really disappearing right now."

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GLAMOS, which monitors 176 of Switzerland's nearly 1,400 glaciers, recently paused measurements at the St. Annafirn glacier in the central Swiss canton of Uri since it had all but vanished.

"We just had some dead ice left," Huss lamented.

The massive glacier loss witnessed in Switzerland was linked in large part to a winter with very low snow volumes, as well as soaring summer temperatures.

"It's a combination of climate change that makes such extreme events more likely, and the very bad combination of meteorological extremes," Huss explained.

"If we continue at this rate... we will see every year such bad years."

Scientists have already cautioned that the Swiss glaciers could all but vanish by the end of the century if no action is taken to control global warming.

"We have seen such strong climate changes in the last years that it's really possible to imagine this country without any glaciers," Huss said.

(With inputs from agencies)

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