{"id":176115,"date":"2025-10-02T22:39:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T22:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/176115\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T22:39:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T22:39:22","slug":"enormous-melting-sees-swiss-glaciers-shrink-by-3-this-year-the-fourth-biggest-retreat-on-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/176115\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Enormous’ melting sees Swiss glaciers shrink by 3% this year, the fourth-biggest retreat on record"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n By&nbspJAMEY KEATEN&nbspwith&nbspAP\n<\/p>\n

\n Published on
\n 02\/10\/2025 – 9:42 GMT+2\n <\/p>\n

\"\"
\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n

Switzerland’s glaciers have faced \u201cenormous\u201d melting this year with a 3 per cent drop in total volume, the fourth-largest annual drop on record, due to the effects of global warming, top Swiss glaciologists reported Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The shrinkage this year means that ice mass in Switzerland \u2014 home to the most glaciers in Europe \u2014 has declined by one-quarter over the last decade, the Swiss glacier monitoring group GLAMOS and the Swiss Academy of Sciences said in their report.<\/p>\n

\u201cGlacial melting in Switzerland<\/a> was once again enormous in 2025,” the scientists said. \u201cA winter with low snow depth combined with heat waves in June and August led to a loss of 3 per cent of the glacier volume.\u201d<\/p>\n

Switzerland is home to nearly 1,400 glaciers,<\/a> the most of any country in Europe, and the ice mass and its gradual melting have implications for hydropower, tourism, farming and water resources in many European countries.<\/p>\n

A winter with little snow and a summer of heatwaves<\/p>\n

More than 1,000 small glaciers in Switzerland have already disappeared, the experts said.<\/p>\n

The teams reported that a winter with little snow was followed by heatwaves<\/a> in June \u2014 the second-warmest June on record \u2014 which left the snow reserves depleted by early July. Ice masses began to melt earlier than ever, they said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGlaciers are clearly retreating because of anthropogenic global warming,\u201d said Matthias Huss, the head of GLAMOS, referring to climate change caused by human activity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the main cause for the acceleration we are seeing in the last two years,\u201d added Huss, who is also a glaciologist at Zurich\u2019s ETHZ university.<\/p>\n

The shrinkage is the fourth-largest after those in 2022, 2023 and back in 2003.<\/p>\n

The retreat and loss of glaciers is also having an impact on Switzerland’s landscape, causing mountains to shift and ground to become unstable.<\/p>\n

Swiss authorities have been on heightened alert for such changes after a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down a mountainside that covered nearly all of the southern village of Blatten in May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By&nbspJAMEY KEATEN&nbspwith&nbspAP Published on 02\/10\/2025 – 9:42 GMT+2 ADVERTISEMENT Switzerland’s glaciers have faced \u201cenormous\u201d melting this year with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[556,1397,20103,8170,1103,90,1040,4161,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-176115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-climate-change","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-glaciers","11":"tag-global-warming","12":"tag-heatwave","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-snow","15":"tag-switzerland","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}