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Glacier melt will unleash avalanche of cascading impacts [1]

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Date: 2025-03-17 14:28:37+01:00

Glacier preservation is an environmental and economic necessity

“WMO’s State of the Global Climate 2024 report confirmed that from 2022-2024, we saw the largest three-year loss of glaciers on record. Seven of the ten most negative mass balance years have occurred since 2016,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

“Preservation of glaciers is a not just an environmental, economic and societal necessity. It’s a matter of survival,” she said.

Based on a compilation of worldwide observations, the World Glacier Monitoring Service estimates that glaciers (separate from the continental ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica) have lost a total of more than 9,000 billion tons since records began in 1975.

“This is equivalent to a huge ice block of the size of Germany with a thickness of 25 meters, says Prof. Dr. Michael Zemp, the Director of the WGMS.

The 2024 hydrological year marked the third year in a row in which all 19 glacier regions experienced a net mass loss. Glacier mass loss was 450 billion tons in the 2024 hydrological year – the fourth most negative year on record. While the mass loss was relatively moderate in regions like the Canadian Arctic or the Greenland periphery, the glaciers in Scandinavia, Svalbard, and North Asia experienced their largest annual mass loss on record.

Figure 3 | Cumulative global glacier mass changes since 1975. The graph shows the sum of annual mass changes relative to 1975. The cumulative mass change is shown in the unit gigatons (Gt) on the left y-axis with corresponding millimeter sea-level rise (mm SLE) equivalents on the right y-axis. The cumulative loss since 1975 totals about 9,000 Gt, corresponding to 25 mm SLE. Data source: WGMS. C3S/ECMWF/WGMS

Glacier melt contributes to sea-level rise

The new findings complement a recent community effort published in the journal Nature in early 2025 and coordinated by the WGMS, which is hosted at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

This study - the so-called Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE) - found that between 2000 and 2023, glaciers lost 5% of their remaining ice. Regionally, the loss ranges from 2% in the Antarctic and Subantarctic Islands to almost 40% in Central Europe.

At present melt rates, many glaciers in Western Canada and the USA, Scandinavia, Central Europe, the Caucasus, New Zealand, and the Tropics will not survive the 21st century.

From 2000 to 2023, the global glacier mass loss totals 6,542 billion tons – or 273 billion tons of ice lost per year, according to the study. This amounts to what the entire global population currently consumes in 30 years, assuming three liters per person per day.

During this period, glacier melt contributed 18 mm to global sea-level rise.

"This might not sound much, but it has a big impact: every millimeter sea-level rise exposes an additional 200,000 to 300,000 people to annual flooding,” said Zemp.

Glaciers are currently the second-largest contributor to global sea-level rise, after the warming of the ocean.

Glacier of the Year 2025

On the first World Day for Glaciers, the WGMS presented the first “Glacier of the Year”. With this, it aims to highlight the beauty of glaciers around the world and to honor the dedication of glaciologists who have been observing them for decades as a contribution to an internationally coordinated monitoring effort. In 2025, South Cascade Glacier was selected as Glacier of the Year.

The South Cascade Glacier is in the Cascade Range in Washington, United States. It has been continuously monitored since 1952 and provides one of the longest uninterrupted records of glaciological mass balance in the Western Hemisphere.

“South Cascade Glacier exemplifies both the beauty of glaciers and the long-term commitment of dedicated scientists and volunteers who have collected direct field data to quantify glacier mass change for more than six decades”, says Caitlyn Florentine, Co-Investigator of the glacier from the U.S. Geological Survey.

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[1] Url: https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/glacier-melt-will-unleash-avalanche-of-cascading-impacts

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