Glaciers in Washington, Montana, British Columbia, Alberta and the Swiss Alps lost an unprecedented amount of ice between 2021 and 2024, a new study reveals.
The cumulative loss in these four years was double that recorded between 2010 and 2020, shrinking glaciers by up to 13%, researchers found. Glaciers in the U.S. and Canada lost 24.5 billion tons (22.2 billion metric tons) of ice per year on average, while glaciers in the Swiss Alps lost 1.7 billion tons (1.5 billion metric tons) of ice per year.
“Previous records were shattered,” study co-author Matthias Huss, a lecturer in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, told Live Science in an email. “We knew that these extreme glacier melt rates would come up. Nevertheless, the day you go out and witness these results based on the measurements, it is still surprising and difficult to accept.”
The studied glaciers are located in regions where there is “very good, almost real-time, observational coverage,” Huss said. The yearly losses of ice from these glaciers between 2021 and 2024, as well as the total loss of ice measured during this period, are record-breaking.
“Meteorological conditions that favored high rates of mass loss included low winter snow accumulation, early-season heat waves, and prolonged warm, dry conditions,” the researchers wrote in the new study, published June 25 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Between 2000 and 2023, glaciers around the world collectively lost 301 billion tons (273 billion metric tons) of ice per year, contributing to around one-fifth of observed sea-level rise, according to the study. The aim of the new research was to determine whether the past four years of glacier melt stood out from previous years.
The researchers found that 2021 to 2024 was the worst period for ice loss since glacier monitoring began in the 1960s. Glacier ice loss was extreme over the four-year period, with one-tenth of all glacier ice in Switzerland melting away in just two years between 2022 and 2023, Huss said.
“It is interesting but also alerting to see that these extremes are widespread and do not occur only in a single region but globally, even though the exact timing of the most important melt years is often not the same,”…
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