Switzerland's glaciers, which are disproportionately impacted by climate change, have lost nearly 20 percent of their mass in five years, experts said on Thursday, with 2026 registering the second-biggest melt on record.

Swiss glaciers saw 5.5 percent of their volume melt away this year, the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland network found in a new study, published after a record hot summer preceded by a winter with little snowfall.

"The glaciers this year have lost enormous quantities of ice," said the network's chief, Matthias Huss, who described 2026 as "a catastrophic year".

"This is a glacier that isn't surviving," he said, perched on the Scex Rouge glacier, at an altitude of nearly 3,000 metres. "There will be probably no ice in 10 or maybe 15 years."

He carefully dismantled the four-metre-long aluminium measurement stake inserted at the centre of the glacier.

In late July, when it was installed, it was completely embedded, but now more than three metres protrude from the grey surface of the ice.

"It's not that we are surprised, because we know how fast the glaciers are melting," Huss said. "But to see the colours of the mountains where there is no snow left, there is just these rocks and these dark glaciers that are a relic from the past... it's just incredible."

Between 2022 and 2026, the melt rate at Switzerland's glaciers was "more than twice as high as in any previously monitored five-year period", the study found, noting an ice volume loss of almost 20 percent since 2021.

While Switzerland's glaciers have long been shrinking, the melt has recently sped up dramatically.

While 10 percent of Swiss ice volume disappeared between 1990 and 2000, 27 percent was lost in the past 10 years, the report showed.

The network based its findings on extensive measurements at 23 reference glaciers in September, which it extrapolated to the nearly 1,300 glacial formations still found in Switzerland.

The report comes after a summer where the months of June, July and August were each the hottest ever recorded in Switzerland since measurements began in 1864, according to the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology.

This year, the protective snow cover on the glaciers had already partially disappeared during the June heatwaves, and had completely disappeared by September, even at high altitudes, the network said.

"Alpine glaciers have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions," it said in a statement. (AFP)


Edited by Aaron Tam