The newly launched Global Glacier Extinction Explorer has revealed the fate of every single glacier on Earth, and the grim results are worrying scientists.
Scientists at ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel created an interactive tool to learn when a glacier is expected to disappear under different levels of global warming.
When creating this map, scientists found that nearly half of today’s glaciers could disappear by 2100 if global warming remains at +1.5°C.
Extreme heatwaves and low winter snowpack have put European glaciers on track to match or break the catastrophic melt record set in 2022.
The map also allows users to toggle between different temperatures — 1.5°C, 2°C, 2.7°C, or 4°C of warming — and the color of the dots on each glacier reveals its extinction fate.
Dark red indicates the glacier is already extinct, orange means it will become extinct between 2027 and 2041 and light blue means the glacier is expected to survive through 2100.
About this map
Glacier changes are traditionally quantified in terms of total (regional) mass and area loss, but such metrics do not fully capture the disappearance of individual glaciers. Yet every glacier, no matter how small, can matter. Beyond their contribution to sea-level rise or regional water resources, glaciers hold important cultural, ecological, and societal value, often deeply rooted in local landscapes and communities. In the context of the UN International Year of Glacier Preservation (2025), this study therefore shifts the focus towards the fate of individual glaciers worldwide.
To assess glacier extinction, two complementary criteria are used. A glacier is considered disappeared (extinct) when its area drops below 0.01 km², consistent with commonly used inventory thresholds, or when its remaining volume falls below 1% of its initial value, indicating that only a negligible ice body persists. To derive volume and area trajectories for each glacier, three global glacier models (GloGEM, OGGM, PyGEM) are used, combined with multiple General Circulation Models and emission scenarios corresponding to projected temperature increases of +1.5°C, +2.0°C, +2.7°C, and +4.0°C. All trajectories are then combined to determine median extinction years, as well as Q25 and Q75 ranges (i.e. the 25% and 75% probability intervals). These results are shown on the map.
Extinction is defined relative to the initial glacier outlines from the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI v6.0). Glacier fragmentation during retreat is not accounted for; all remaining ice within the original glacier extent is treated as part of the same glacier.
Data sources
- Extinction projections: Van Tricht, L., Zekollari, H., Huss, M. et al. Peak glacier extinction in the mid-twenty-first century. Nature Climate Change 16, 143–147 (2026). doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02513-9
- Regional and glacier-specific results (including those shown here) are publicly available on Zenodo: doi:10.5281/zenodo.17371641
- Glacier outlines: RGI Consortium (2017). Randolph Glacier Inventory — A Dataset of Global Glacier Outlines, Version 6. Boulder, Colorado USA. NSIDC: National Snow and Ice Data Center. doi:10.7265/4m1f-gd79
- Ice volume: Farinotti, D., Huss, M., Fürst, J. J., Landmann, J., Machguth, H., Maussion, F., and Pandit, A.: A consensus estimate for the ice thickness distribution of all glaciers on Earth. Nat. Geosci., 12, 168–173, doi:10.1038/s41561-019-0300-3, 2019.
Acknowledgements
This application is built on open-source software: MapLibre GL JS (map rendering), PMTiles (vector tile streaming), GeoPandas and NumPy (data processing), GDAL / ogr2ogr (tile generation), and go-pmtiles (tile packaging). The web application was designed and built by K. Van Tricht, with the assistance of Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-6 Astra for the frontend code and data pipeline structure.
Feedback
If you notice incorrect data or have suggestions for improved naming, please send them to lander.van.tricht@vub.be.
The map is based on 2024 projections by researchers at ETH Zurich, which suggest that under +1.5°C of global warming, around 2,000 glaciers could disappear every year.
“Every fraction of a degree matters”, according to Dr. Lander Van Tricht, who analyzed the research.
- At +1.5°C of warming: Nearly 50% of all glaciers vanish.
- At +2.7°C of warming: Only 20% of glaciers survive.
- At +4°C of warming: A catastrophic 90% of the world’s glaciers are wiped off the map, leaving just 10% standing.
Even though 2100 isn’t around the corner, 2026 has already shown substantial glacier depletion that was consistent with the findings from the 2024 study. Between low winter snow and summer heatwaves, the European Alps have experienced “substantial” ice loss.
The Bella Tola Glacier near Saint-Luc in Switzerland was declared extinct last month, a prediction made in 2024 that fell directly in the extinction period predicted. Another Swiss glacier, Urirotstock Glacier, was declared extinct this summer, which Dr. Van Tricht said are examples that makes glacier extinction “concrete.”
In 2025, Swiss glaciers melted at an enormous rate with a 3% drop in total volume. This shrinkage caused ice mass in Switzerland to drop by one-quarter over the last decade.
Italian researchers from Ca’Foscari University of Venice estimate that glaciers outside Greenland and Antarctica contain 150,000 cubic kilometers of ice, and if they melted, global sea levels would rise by at least 12 inches.
Dr. Van Tricht said the glaciers projected to disappear in the study are already vanishing today, and he urgently expressed through his study findings that this problem “is not distant” or “end-of-century” but is happening presently.
