Switzerland’s glaciers shed more than 5% of their ice volume in the 12 months to September 2026, and the latest tally puts the five-year toll at nearly 20% of everything that was there in 2021. Mass-balance measurements across the country showed an average thinning of 2.5 to 4 metres. Two small glaciers, Bella Tola in the canton of Valais and Griessfirn in Glarus, disappeared for good.
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The numbers come from the annual report of GLAMOS, the Glacier Monitoring Switzerland network anchored at ETH Zurich and the universities of Fribourg and Zurich. Matthias Huss, who leads the network, co-wrote the 2026 edition with Andreas Bauder, Andreas Linsbauer and Barandun. A single bad summer did not produce the five-year figure: it is the accumulation of repeated heavy years, with 2022 still holding the record for the largest single-year loss.
A winter without snow and 76 days above 4,000 metres
According to ETH Zurich’s account of the report, the winter of 2025-2026 ranked among the ten least snowy since records began, which left glaciers with a thin protective blanket going into spring. Summer then pushed the freezing level above 4,000 metres on 76 days, more than twice the usual count and a new Swiss record. By September, snow had vanished even at 3,500 metres, exposing ice that normally stays buried.
The summer’s melt released roughly 2.2 trillion litres of water between July and September, as ScienceDaily summarised the findings. The report puts that at more than four times the annual drinking water use of all Swiss households. Losses on some lower glacier tongues reached about 10 metres of thickness, far above the national average.
Rhône, Aletsch and Clariden set records while 2022 stayed on top
Three large glaciers, the Rhône, the Aletsch and the Clariden, recorded their greatest melt ever measured in 2026. Nationally, the year still fell short of 2022, when melt rates peaked. Reporting by Swissinfo attributes the narrow miss to more snow on many glaciers and less Saharan dust darkening the surface than four years earlier, and it measured a 13-metre drop in ice thickness at the lowest monitoring point on the Aletsch tongue.
Small glaciers pay first. Huss estimated, in the Swissinfo report, that about 30 small glaciers may have disappeared this summer, and the same account counts 160 glaciers lost between 2016 and 2023 and more than 1,000 over 50 years, roughly 40% of the national total. The date on which melting begins, which the account calls the glacier loss day, fell on 29 June in 2026, three days later in the calendar than 2022’s 26 June but still earlier than any year since 2000 other than that record summer. Hydrologists add a second warning: meltwater runoff peaks and then declines, and Alpine glaciers have reached or will soon reach that peak water point, after which rivers lose a summer buffer they have leaned on for generations.
Scale matters for the comparison. Swiss ice volume has now fallen to about a third of its 2003 level, the Associated Press reported through PBS NewsHour, with the 2026 loss recorded at 5.5%, the second-biggest percentage drop on record. A 5.5% loss in 2026 cuts a far smaller base than the 3.5% loss of 2003 did, so a similar-looking percentage now removes much less ice.
What Huss and other glaciologists say about the trajectory
Huss told reporters that the warming driving the losses can be attributed almost entirely to human-caused climate change, and said it is almost too late to save the Alpine glaciers, even though polar ice sheets can still be protected. Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, stressed that every 0.1 degree Celsius of avoided warming matters, a point Al Jazeera carried in its report on the five-year loss.
GLAMOS and the Swiss Academy of Sciences concluded that Alpine glaciers have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions. Projections cited in the Al Jazeera piece are stark: rapid emission cuts could save roughly one-third of the Alpine ice mass, while strong warming could erase more than 90% of it by 2100.
Giovanni De Cesare of the EPFL, the Swiss federal technology school in Lausanne, cautioned in the same Swissinfo coverage that once glaciers are gone, water supply will depend on rain and snow that are harder to predict. A 2025 study cited there projects that, without deep emissions cuts, half of Alpine glaciers could vanish within 20 years, with only the largest, such as the Aletsch and the Rhône, likely to last to 2100.
The reach of the problem extends past the mountains. Switzerland draws more than half of its electricity from hydropower, and roughly 4% of the Swiss workforce is employed in tourism, both sectors tied to snow and ice. The full dataset sits in the GLAMOS annual report record, which lists the measurement series behind the five-year loss figure. Whether the next few summers repeat 2026, or whether snowier winters briefly slow the decline, is the open question the monitoring network will answer in its next report.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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