Glaciers are melting: How you can see when each of them could go extinct

The devastating glacier collapse in Nepal last month showed how rapid changes high in the mountains can affect people far downstream.On August 26, a collapse involving glacier ice and rock near the Nepal-China border triggered a destructive flood cascade, killing more than 1,300 people across Nepal and Tibet, with thousands more reported missing.Scientists have linked the disaster to a warming and increasingly unstable Himalayan environment, where glaciers are melting just like they are around the world. A father and his son look at the melting Plaine Morte Glacier. (Photo: AFP) Now, a new interactive website offers another way to understand what is happening to the world's glaciers: by showing when individual glaciers could disappear. A MAP OF EVERY GLACIER ON THE PLANETThe Global Glacier Extinction Explorer, developed by researchers from ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, allows users to search for glaciers around the world and see how their futures could change under different levels of global warming.The website is based on research published in Nature Climate Change, which examined the future of individual glaciers rather than only calculating the total amount of ice the world could lose. The website, where global glaciers are colour-coded as per projected extinction date. (Photo: Lander Van Tricht) “Global numbers such as glacier mass or area loss can feel very abstract," said lead author Lander Van Tricht. "With this website, people can zoom into their own valley or mountain region and see what different levels of global warming could mean for the glaciers they know.”The researchers found that glacier disappearance could peak around the middle of this century.Under 1.5°C of warming, around 2,000 glaciers could disappear each year around 2041. At 4°C of warming, the peak could reach about 4,000 glaciers a year in the mid-2050s."EVERY FRACTION OF A DEGREE MATTERS"The difference between warming scenarios becomes even clearer by 2100.Nearly half of today's glaciers could survive under 1.5°C of warming, compared with about 20% at 2.7°C and fewer than 10% at 4°C. A screengrab of the melting glaciers highlighted near the Indian subcontinent. (Photo: GGEE) “Every fraction of a degree matters,” said Van Tricht. “Limiting warming to 1.5°C could preserve more than twice as many glaciers as a 2.7°C trajectory by 2100.”The dates shown on the website are projections, not fixed deadlines. A glacier's future depends on factors including its size, elevation, shape and local climate.GLACIERS ARE ALREADY DISAPPEARINGThe impact of a rapidly warming planet is already visible.In Switzerland, the Bella Tola Glacier was declared extinct in August 2026 after almost completely disappearing, while the Urirotstock Glacier was declared extinct earlier this summer. The Rhone Glacier near Goms, Switzerland, is covered with sheets to slow down warming. (Photo: AP) “These examples make the concept of glacier extinction very concrete,” Van Tricht said. “Our projections showed that many small Alpine glaciers are approaching the end of their lives, and we are now witnessing this process in real time.”Glaciers do not disappear because of one unusually warm summer. Their decline is the result of years of cumulative snow and ice loss.“Behind every disappearing glacier is a place, a history and often a community that will experience its absence,” Van Tricht said. “The fact that some of the glaciers projected to disappear in our study are already vanishing today shows that glacier extinction is not a distant, end-of-century problem. It is happening now.”The website can be visited here.- EndsPublished On: Sep 12, 2026 10:09 IST