Three news headlines from as many parts of the world last week pointed in the same ominous direction – that the impact of climate change has started wrecking major havoc. The massive glacier collapse last Wednesday in southern Switzerland partially destroyed the small village of Blatten, which had been completely evacuated a week earlier due to the impending danger. Britain said last Thursday that the northwest of England was now officially in drought status after the driest start to spring in decades caused water levels in rivers and reservoirs to decline. Further, a major new study warned last Thursday that more than three-quarters of the world’s glaciers are set to vanish if climate change continues unchecked, fuelling sea-level rise and jeopardising water supplies for billions.
The huge collapse on the Birch Glacier in Blatten had been expected for several days. The Alps mountain range in Europe has seen its glaciers retreat in recent years due to warming that most scientists attribute to climate change. Swiss glaciers, severely impacted by climate change, melted as much in 2022 and 2023 as between 1960 and 1990, losing in total about 10% of their volume. The amount of snow covering Switzerland’s glaciers at the end of winter this year was 13% below the 2010-2020 average, a group of glacier monitoring experts said earlier in May.
Britain has basked in its sunniest spring on record, from March to May, according to the Met Office weather forecaster, though the lack of rainfall has raised some concerns about conserving water supply. The Environment Agency said reservoir storage levels in northwest England – home to the picturesque Lake District as well as the cities of Manchester and Liverpool – were lower than during the same time in the 1984, 1995 and 2022 drought years. Scientists say climate change is making droughts and drier summers more frequent.
The study on glaciers, published in the journal Science, provides the clearest picture yet of long-term glacier loss, by revealing that every fraction of a degree in global temperature rise significantly worsens the outlook. Under existing climate policies, global temperatures are projected to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 – a pathway that would ultimately erase 76% of current glacier mass over the coming centuries. But if warming is held to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target, 54% of glacial mass could be preserved, according to the study, which combined outputs from eight glacier models to simulate ice loss across a range of future climate scenarios.
“What is really special about this study is we can really show how every tenth of a degree of additional warming matters,” co-lead author Lilian Schuster of the University of Innsbruck told AFP. The paper’s release comes as Swiss authorities monitor flood risks following the collapse of the massive Birch Glacier.
Glaciers are found on every continent except Australia – from Mount Kilimanjaro to the Austrian Alps and the Karakoram range in Pakistan. While most are clustered in the polar regions, their presence in mountain ranges across the world makes them vital to local ecosystems, agriculture and human communities. Vast bodies of snow, ice, rock, and sediment that gain mass in winter and lose it in summer, glaciers formed in the Earth’s deep past when conditions were far colder than today. Their meltwater sustains rivers critical for farming, fisheries, and drinking water. Their loss can have profound ripple effects, from disrupting tourism economies to eroding cultural heritage.
Around 25% of current sea-level rise is attributed to glacier melt. Even if all fossil fuel use stopped today, the study finds that 39% of glacier mass loss is already locked in – enough to raise sea levels by at least 113mm. One key finding of the study is that some glaciers are far more vulnerable than others – and the global average obscures drastic regional losses. Glaciers in the European Alps, the Rockies of the US and Canada, and Iceland are expected to lose nearly all their ice at 2C of warming – the fallback goal of the Paris accord.