World heading toward ‘peak glacier extinction’ with up to 4,000 set to disappear a year

New research gives a glimpse of just how quickly that might happen.

(CNN) — Hundreds gathered to say goodbye when 700-year-old Pizol died. The funeral in Switzerland in 2019 was solemn. Mourners wore black; flowers were laid; a priest spoke. It was a symbolic moment: Pizol had been a glacier, but human-driven climate change had reduced it to some scattered chunks of ice.

Pizol is far from the first glacier death. Thousands have vanished over the past few decades and as the world continues to heat up, they are expected to disappear at an increasing pace. New research gives a glimpse of just how quickly that might happen, and it’s stark.

By the middle of the century, the number of glaciers disappearing is set to peak at up to 4,000 a year, if humans keep pumping out climate pollution, according to a study published Monday in Nature Climate Change. That’s equivalent to losing all the glaciers in the European Alps in just one year.

Research has tended to focus on the total amount or area of ice lost from glaciers as temperatures tick upward, rather than changes to their total number. This is partly because the number of glaciers is a less clearly defined metric. It depends on assessments of what constitutes a glacier and current inventories sometimes struggle to detect smaller or debris-covered ice bodies. Best estimates say there are currently more than 200,000 glaciers on Earth.

But the study authors say knowing where and when individual glaciers will vanish is important. It shows “climate change does not just lead to some ice melt, but it leads to the complete extinction of many glaciers,” said Matthias Huss, a study author and a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who spoke at Pizol’s funeral back in 2019.

The scientists looked at the planet’s glaciers using a global database to pin down “peak glacier extinction,” meaning the period during which the largest number of glaciers disappear.

They used models to determine when each individual glacier would become too small to be classified as a glacier: defined as when its area falls below 0.01 square kilometers (0.4 square miles), or it reaches less than 1% of its initial volume, as measured around the year 2000.

Their analysis found that glacier extinction will peak around mid-century, with the exact timing and extent dependent on the level of global warming.

If the world manages to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, something it is not on track to do, the number of individual glaciers disappearing will peak around 2041, at roughly 2,000 per year.

At 4 degrees of warming, that peak shifts to the mid-2050s and intensifies to around 4,000 a year. This is 3 to 5 times higher than the present rate of global loss, the report says.

The world is currently on course for around 2.7 degrees of warming if climate pledges are met. At this level, peak extinction will happen over a longer period, with the world losing around 3,000 glaciers a year between 2040 and 2060.

The researchers also drilled down to specific regions. In areas where smaller glaciers dominate, such as the European Alps, parts of the Andes and North Asia, more than half the glaciers are expected to disappear within the next two decades, the report found. They are also expected to see an earlier peak in glacier extinction, around 2040.

In contrast, regions with bigger glaciers, including Greenland and the Russian Arctic, will see a delayed peak in glacier extinction, later in the century.

Whether the world ends up witnessing the deaths of 2,000 or 4,000 glaciers a year is all about how much is done to rein in global heating.

Only 20% of glaciers are expected to remain by 2100 under 2.7 degrees of warming, compared to around 50% at 1.5 degrees. At 4 degrees, the world is looking at a nearly complete loss of glaciers.

“This study does a great job at highlighting the fact not only are glaciers melting worldwide, many of them may be entirely gone in the coming decades; and the trend is accelerating,” said Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at the University of California at Irvine, who was not involved in the research. It is “a point of no return, because reforming a glacier would take decades if not centuries,” he told CNN.

The losses will have significant implications. Glaciers are a vital source of water for many communities but beyond that, they are a tourist draw, attracting millions of visitors each year and many ski resorts depend on them. They also hold a deep cultural importance for communities, tied to local traditions.

“They are really icons of climate change,” said Harry Zekollari, a study author and glaciologist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. “If you go to someone, you talk to them on the street about the fact that temperatures have risen by 2 degrees, it’s really difficult to picture, but glaciers, they’re so visual.”

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