Glaciers in many regions will not survive the 21st century if they keep melting at the current rate, potentially jeopardizing hundreds of millions of people living downstream, UN climate experts said on the first World Day for Glaciers.
Together with ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers lock up about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater reserves. They are striking indicators of climate change as they typically remain about the same size in a stable climate.
But, with rising temperatures and global warming triggered by human-induced climate change, they are melting at unprecedented speed, said Sulagna Mishra, a scientific officer at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Last year, glaciers in Scandinavia, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and North Asia experienced the largest annual loss of overall mass on record. Glaciologists determine the state of a glacier by measuring how much snow falls on it and how much melt occurs every year, according to UN partner the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) at the University of Zurich.
In the 500-mile-long Hindu Kush mountain range, located in the western Himalayas and stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the livelihoods of more than 120 million farmers are under threat from glacial loss, Mishra said.
The mountain range has been dubbed the “third pole” because of the extraordinary water resources it holds, she noted.
Despite these vast freshwater reserves, it may already be too late to save them for future generations.
Large masses of perennial ice are disappearing quickly, with five out of the past six years seeing the most rapid glacier retreat on record, according to the WMO.
The period from 2022 to 2024 also experienced the largest-ever three-year loss.
“We are seeing an unprecedented change in the glaciers,” which in many cases may be irreversible, said Mishra.
WGMS estimates that glaciers, which do not include the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets, have lost more than 9,000 billion tons of mass since 1975.
“This is equivalent to a huge ice block of the size of Germany with a thickness of 25 meters,” said WGMS director Michael Zemp. The world has lost 273 billion tons of ice on average every year since 2000, he added, highlighting the findings of a new international study into glacier mass change. UN News