Snow and ice on Swiss glaciers melting at alarming rate amid heatwave, expert says

Swiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice due to the heatwave battering Europe, according to the head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos). The snow and ice accumulated last winter by Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have all melted away by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day. All further melting between now and October will see the size of glaciers in the Swiss Alps shrink. In data going back to 2000, the only time that the tipping point arrived even earlier was in 2022, when it came on 26 June. The grim scenario is driven by the current heatwave, as well as the one in May – both coming on the back of another winter with poor snowfall. “We’re just seeing enormous ablation, ice melt rates and snow melt rates all over the Alps,” Glamos network chief Matthias Huss told AFP on Friday, as multiple Swiss weather stations registered new all-time records. “We are three months too early compared to a healthy state.” This century, the tipping point, on average, has been reached in mid-August – already bad news for the nation’s glaciers, which are shrinking at a staggering rate. Much of the water that flows into the Rhine and the Rhone – two of Europe’s major rivers – comes from the Alpine glaciers. …