Before and after images show that glaciers disappear before our eyes

When Matthias Hus first visited the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland 35 years ago, the ice was just a short walk from where his parents would park the car.

“When I first stepped on the ice … there (there was) a special sense of eternity,” says Matthias.

Today is half an hour from the same parking space and the scene is very different.

“Every time I go back, I remember how it was before,” recalls Matthias, who is now the director of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (glamos), “What the glacier looked like when I was a child.”

There are similar stories about many glaciers all over the planet because these frozen ice rivers are retreating – quickly.

In 2024, glaciers outside the giant ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica lost 450 billion tonnes of ice, according to a recent report by the World Meteorological Organization.

This is equivalent to a block of 7 km (4.3 miles) tall, 7 km wide and 7 km deep – enough water to fill 180 million Olympic pools.

“The glaciers are melting all over the world,” says Prof. Ben Marzaon of the Institute of Geography at the University of Bremen. “They sit in a climate, which is now very hostile because of global warming.”

The Swiss glaciers have been particularly affected, lost one quarter of their ice in the last 10 years, glazes have revealed this week.

“It’s really hard to understand the degree of this melt,” explains Dr. Huss.

But photos – from space and earth – tell their own story.

Satellite images show how the Rhône glacier has changed since 1990 when D -Hus visited for the first time. In the front of the glacier is a lake where there was ice.

Until recently, glaciologists in the Alps used to believe that 2% of ice were lost in one year for “extreme”.

Then 2022 blew this idea from the water, with nearly 6% of the remaining ice of Switzerland lost in one year.

This was followed by significant losses in 2023, 2024 and now 2025.

Regina Hock, Professor of Glassology at the University of Oslo, has visited the Alps from the 70s.

Changes through her life are “really stunning,” she says, but “what we see now is really massive changes within a few years.”

Clarden’s glacier, in the northeastern part of Switzerland, was approximately balanced by the end of the 20th century – picking around as much ice through snowfall as losses from melting.

But this century he melted quickly.

For much smaller glaciers, such as Pizol Glacier in the northeastern Swiss Alps, that was too much.

“This is one of the glaciers I was watching, and now it is gone,” says Dr. Huss. “Definitely makes me sad.”

The photos allow us to look even more back in time.

The Grice Glacier, in southern Switzerland, near the Italian border, has retired by about 2.2 km (1.4 miles) in the last century. Where the end of the glacier once is now a large glacial lake.

In the southeast of Switzerland, the Perse Glacier once fed the larger Mortherate glacier flowing down to the valley. Now the two are no longer meeting.

And the largest glacier in the Alps, the big alette, has retired by about 2.3 km (1.4 miles) in the last 75 years. Where there was ice, now there are trees.

The glaciers grow and shrink naturally for millions of years, of course.

In the cold photos of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries – part of the small ice age – the glaciers regularly advanced.

During this time, many were considered cursed by the devil in alpine folklore, and their progress was associated with spiritual forces as they threatened Hamlet and agricultural land.

There are even tales of peasants who call on priests to talk to the ghosts of the glaciers and make them move up the mountain.

The glaciers began their widespread retreat through the Alps in about 1850, although time varied from place to place.

This coincides with increasing industrialization when the burning of fossil fuels, more special coal, has begun to heat our atmosphere, but it is difficult to separate the natural and human causes that are far back in time.

Where there is no real doubt, it is that the especially fast losses in the last 40 years or more are not natural.

Without The people warming the planet – by burning fossil fuels and release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) – glaciers are expected to be approximately stable.

“We can only explain it if we take into account CO2 emissions,” confirms Prof. Marzaon.

Even more enlightening is that these large, ice -flowing bodies can take decades to completely adapt to the rapid warming climate. This means that even if global temperatures stabilize tomorrow, glaciers will continue to withdraw.

“Much of the future melt of glaciers is already locked,” explains Prof. Marzaon. “They are lagging behind climate change.”

But everything is not lost.

Half of the ice left in the world mountain glaciers can be reserved if Global warming is limited to 1.5C over the “pre-industrial” levels of the late 1800s, according to studies published this year through The Journal ScienceS

Our present trajectory leads us to warming about 2.7 ° C above the pre-industrial levels by the end of this century-which will eventually see that three quarters of ice eventually.

This additional water that enters rivers and ultimately the oceans means higher sea level for coastal population around the world.

But the loss of ice will be particularly sharply felt on the mountain communities dependent on fresh water glaciers.

The glaciers look like giant tanks. They collect water as snowfall – which turns into ice – during cold, wet periods and release it like melted water during warm periods.

This melt helps to stabilize the river flows during hot, dry summer – until the glacier disappears.

The loss of this water resource has shock effects for all who rely on glaciers – for irrigation, drinking, hydropower and even shipping.

Switzerland is not immunized by these challenges, but the consequences are much deeper to the high mountains of Asia, referred to by some as the third pole due to the volume of ice.

About 800 million people rely at least partly on the melted glaciers there, especially on agriculture. This includes the pool of the Gorna Indus River, which serves parts of China, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In regions with dry summers, melted water from ice and snow can be the only important source of water for months.

“That’s where we see the biggest vulnerability,” says Prof. Hock.

So how do scientists feel when they face the future glaciers perspectives in a warming world?

“It’s sad,” says Prof. Hock. “But at the same time, this is also empowering. If you decarbonize and reduce (carbon) imprint, you can keep glaciers.

“We have it in our hands.”

Top image: Tschierva, Swiss Alps Glacier, in 1935 and 2022. Credit: Swisstopo and Vaw Glaciology, ETH Zurich.

Additional reporting from Dominic Bailey and Ervan Rivo.