Dozens of small Swiss glaciers may vanish this summer

Dozens of small Swiss glaciers are at risk of disappearing completely this summer. The warning comes from glaciologist Matthias Huss, for whom 2026 could turn out to be one of the most dramatic years since records began.

"We are heading for the second most intense glacier melt ever recorded," Huss told Keystone-ATS. The most vulnerable are the small glaciers, and his forecast is that many will vanish altogether. Precise numbers are hard to give for now: the estimate is that between twenty and thirty could lose what remains of their ice for good.

One case has already drawn attention. The newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported the disappearance of the small Bella Tola glacier in Valais after receiving photographs from hikers. Huss urges caution, however: the images do not allow anyone to say with certainty that Bella Tola is definitively gone, because ice may still lie beneath the debris.

The Confederation's inventory counts about 1,400 glaciers, roughly a thousand fewer than a hundred and fifty years ago. Most are small and some do not even have a name.

Two factors combined

The situation is critical for the larger glaciers too, and the reason lies in an unfavourable combination of two elements. There was little snow at the end of winter, and the heat arrived early in the summer.

Snow cover is a glacier's most important protection, because it reflects solar radiation. When it is missing, the old, dark ice is left exposed, absorbs energy and melts quickly.

The signal was readable as early as the end of June. According to the Swiss glacier monitoring network GLAMOS, winter reserves were largely exhausted by that date. Normally this does not happen before August, and only in 2022 did it occur even earlier.

The scale of this year's melt cannot be quantified with certainty because measurements are still under way. Huss nonetheless expects that the record levels of four years ago will not be reached, when Switzerland lost about six per cent of its glacier mass. Compared with 2022 there was slightly more snow on the glaciers and the impact of Saharan dust, which darkens surfaces and speeds up melting, was less significant.

Losing glaciers is not only a matter of landscape. Part of the summer flow of watercourses depends on their melt, as the Federal Office for the Environment also notes when it observes that the water situation south of the Alps is less dramatic this year precisely because of the glacial contribution.