Across the world, as the climate warms, mountain glaciers are disappearing. Not only are they rapidly losing mass, with recent assessments indicating that globally, glaciers lost 273 gigatonnes of ice from 2000-2023, which is 5% of their year 2000 total ice mass1. This global scale ice loss is causing glaciologists to start to record the […]
Future global glacier extinction Read More »
Globally, glacier melting is getting faster Glaciers and ice sheets are in trouble. Worldwide, glaciers (not including the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets) lost 273 billion tonnes of ice from 2000-2023, with the second decade (2012-2023) increasing by 36% compared with the first1. In 2025 alone, glaciers lost 408 billion tonnes of ice, equivalent to
Can we ‘preserve’ glaciers with geoengineering? Read More »
How is climate change affecting the Antarctic Peninsula? And how will the Antarctic Peninsula change under future climate? These questions are tackled in Davies et al. 2026, which analyses climate model outputs for three scenarios: SSPs 1-2.6, SSP3-7.0 and SSP 5-8.5. These reflect a sustainable future, a medium-high emissions future and a high emissions future
The Changing Antarctic Peninsula Read More »
The Deplete and Retreat team are delighted to be attending the first ever celebration for International Day of the Glacier in Paris, at the UNESCO HQ, in March 2025. We will be hosting a side event, entitled “A vanishing mountain cryosphere and its importance to the water cycle under climate change“, aimed at informing stakeholders
Policy brief: The future of the Andes Water Towers Read More »
Guest post by Jenny Snell Icelandic glaciers, like those in many regions around the world, are melting fast1. Ice margins are retreating, and lakes are forming at these margins, called proglacial lakes1. These lakes speed up the loss of ice, change the flow of sediment through rivers, cause coastal erosion and can create a risk
Icelandic glacier loss Read More »
It’s the first ever ‘International Day of the Glacier’ on 21st March 2025. This is part of the ‘International year of glacier preservation‘, being celebrated world-wide. Why is this being celebrated? Worldwide, glaciers are shrinking. Everywhere we look, glaciers are getting smaller each year; they are melting and losing more ice than they are gaining
By Gunjan Silwal, OnePlanet Doctoral Student Nepal, a landlocked Himalayan country with 30 million people1, has a strikingly diverse topography. Within just 150–200 km across the width of the nation, its elevation shifts dramatically from the low-lying Terai Plains (~70 m asl) to Mount Everest (8,848 m), the world’s highest peak. This extreme altitudinal variation creates
Glacier status, recession and change in Nepal Read More »
Glaciers are important for their beauty, cultural importance, ecosystem services such as water resources, economic value, and potential to raise global sea levels. This is an impassioned plea to recognise the value of our glaciers worldwide, and to protect them to the best of our ability. Globally shrinking glaciers Glaciers exist in pretty well every
Why are glaciers important? Read More »
Globally, glaciers are receding, one of the most visual and striking pieces of evidence of the way in which climate change is affecting our planet. The evidence is clear, both in satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and repeat glacier photography. Global scale remote sensing Worldwide, glaciers are shrinking. We know this from satellite measurements, that
Evidence of global glacier recession: repeat photographs and satellite imagery Read More »
Worldwide, glaciers are being lost. Amongst the most dramatic evidence of climatic warming is the retreat and disappearance of mountain glaciers around the world. Retreat has accelerated worldwide over the last fifty years 1 and we now face the reality of permanent loss of mountain glaciers. Where are glaciers disappearing? The extent and volume of
