Glaciers from the Rockies to the Alps are melting much faster than expected

When Brian Menounos stepped onto British Columbia’s Haig Glacier last summer, the ice under his crampons felt thinner than ever.

“Over the last four years, glaciers lost twice as much ice compared to the previous decade,” he later warned. “Glacial melt is just falling off a cliff.”

A new study pieces together twenty-plus years of satellite images, laser surveys, and boots-on-ice measurements from the Rockies, Cascades, and Swiss Alps.

The verdict: glaciers in western Canada, the contiguous United States, and Switzerland have already surrendered roughly 12 percent of their total volume since 2021 – and the pace is accelerating.

Scientists mapped glacier melt

Menounos, a University of Northern British Columbia professor and chief scientist at the Hakai Institute, led an international crew that surveyed three benchmark glaciers in western Canada, four in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, and twenty in Switzerland.

These ice structures do more than decorate postcards. They are summer water towers for farms, rivers, and hydropower; they draw hikers and skiers by the millions; and they even steady mountain slopes by gluing rock walls together.

The team combined high-resolution laser altimetry from aircraft, on-site stake readings, and thousands of satellite scenes.

Those overlapping snapshots told a consistent story: from 2021 through 2024, the monitored glaciers shed as much ice as they had during the entire previous ten years. In sheer water volume, the loss is equivalent to draining huge alpine reservoirs within a few melt seasons.

Dust and fire darken glaciers

Why did melting suddenly roar ahead? Two culprits stand out. The first is heat. Early-season heat waves have flipped the melt switch weeks ahead of schedule, scrubbing away winter snow that normally reflects sunlight and protects the ice below.

Switzerland’s record-hot summer of 2022 and western Canada’s scorching spring of 2023 gave the glaciers no time to recover. As Menounos put it, “2023 was the year of record, no question.”

The second culprit is surface darkening. Pure snow is brilliant white, bouncing most sunlight back to space. But when windblown dust or wildfire soot coats the surface, that reflectivity – scientists call it albedo – plummets, and the ice soaks up heat like a blacktop road.

In the Alps, Saharan dust storms tinted the snow a dull ocher. Across North America, smoke from unprecedented wildfire seasons peppered the ice with black carbon.

At Haig Glacier, the researchers estimate that darkening by soot accounted for nearly forty percent of the melt between 2022 and 2023.

A blind spot in climate projections

These albedo changes aren’t just cosmetic. They crank up melt rates beyond what temperature alone would dictate, yet most global glacier models still ignore the effect. Menounos believes that oversight is dangerous.

“If we’re thinking, Well, we have 50 years before the glaciers are gone, it could actually be 30,” he said. “So we really need better models going forward.”

Meanwhile, wildfire activity is poised to intensify under continued warming, sending ever more carbon-rich ash onto the shrinking ice.

That feedback loop – hotter summers, bigger fires, darker glaciers, faster melt – suggests that standard forecasts may be too optimistic about how long mid-latitude ice will survive.

Melting glaciers reshape landscapes

Glaciers in Alaska or Greenland dominate sea-level discussions, but the mountain ice in this study plays a different yet critical role.

During late summer droughts, meltwater keeps rivers flowing, cools salmon habitat, and refills reservoirs that power cities from Seattle to Bern.

As the ice retreats, that dependable trickle will shrink, leaving farms, hydro dams, and ecosystems exposed to deeper dry spells.

A faster melt-out invites hazards, too. When valley glaciers thin, steep rock faces lose their frozen mortar and can tumble into valley bottoms. Newly formed glacial lakes, dammed only by loose rubble, can burst in sudden floods.

The catastrophic debris flow in British Columbia’s Elliot Creek in 2020, linked to rapid deglaciation, hints at risks that could multiply as ice fronts march uphill.

A landscape without long-term ice

All of this raises a sobering question: how do communities adapt to a future with little or no perennial ice? Menounos argues that water planners, engineers, and tourism operators need to start drawing up new playbooks.

“Society needs to be asking what are the implications of ice loss going forward,” he said. “We need to start preparing for a time when glaciers are gone from western Canada and the United States.”

That might mean revisiting water-sharing agreements, fortifying infrastructure against outburst floods, or reinventing alpine tourism for snow-starved summers.

A warning etched in melting glaciers

The study’s most unsettling lesson is how quickly feedbacks can compress geologic timescales into human lifetimes. A hotter atmosphere begets larger fires; those fires darken glaciers; dark ice melts at turbo speed, exposing yet more dark ice. Each loop feeds the next.

If policymakers needed a tangible example of climate acceleration, these rapidly vanishing ice fields provide it.

The sight of a glacier “falling off a cliff” is no longer a metaphor. It is a literal snapshot of Earth’s changing face – one that may disappear from living memory far sooner than we ever imagined.

The study is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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