BERN, Switzerland — Switzerland’s glaciers lost more than 5% of their ice in 2026, marking another year of rapid decline. The loss reflects a wider global trend: Glaciers around the world have been shrinking at increasingly rapid rates, a phenomenon scientists link directly to global warming.

Matthias Huss leads Switzerland’s glacier monitoring network, known as GLAMOS. Each summer, he heads high into the mountains to measure the country’s ice fields. For years, his research has documented rapid ice loss, with the decline peaking in 2022, when Switzerland recorded a record 6% loss in a single year.

At the end of this year’s long, hot summer, Huss returned to some of the glaciers to find much of the ice gone.

Melting ice exposes bare rock on a Swiss glacier, as rising temperatures accelerate the loss of ice across the Alps.

Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences

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Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences

“They are completely devoid of ice,” he said. “It’s a moon landscape that is dry and dead. There are some little remnants, some ice blocks still lying around and melting there on the hot rocks.”

In other places, alpine plants are now seeding themselves in areas once covered by glaciers that were meters thick. This year’s glacier monitoring report shows the ice loss in 2026 is 5.5%, and the only reason it is slightly lower than 2022’s record is because there was slightly more winter snow covering the ice.

Ominously, though, Huss’ research shows that individual glaciers, among them Switzerland’s biggest, like the mighty Rhône and Aletsch, have suffered record ice loss this year.

Why is this important? Because these huge ice fields are often called Europe’s water towers. They store winter snow and release it gently as it melts over the spring and summer. That snowmelt fills Europe’s key waterways, like the Rhine and the Danube. The water is key to Europe’s food supply, and much more.

“It’s the food supply, it’s the transportation chains,” says Huss. This summer, as river levels sank, freight transport in the Rhine and Danube came to a standstill, and nuclear power stations, cooled by river water, had to be temporarily shut down.

This situation can only get worse if the melt continues. Although Europe’s rivers did have some water this summer, it came not from seasonal snowmelt, but from the glaciers themselves melting. Once they are gone — and 1,200 smaller glaciers have disappeared in the last 50 years — drought could pose an existential threat to Europe’s farmers.