Glaciers are shrinking nearly everywhere. Outside the two big ice sheets, the world's glaciers lost roughly 270 billion tonnes of ice a year between 2000 and 2023, about 5% of their total volume, and the pace has been roughly a third faster since 2012.
The ice sheets are losing ice too. Greenland has been losing roughly 250 billion tonnes a year and Antarctica more than 100 billion. Together with glaciers, this is raising sea level by more than 4 mm a year.
How warming destabilises ice:
- Melt and thinning. Longer, hotter summers remove more ice than winter snow replaces. Exposed dark ice absorbs more sunlight, so melt feeds itself.
- Calving and ice shelves. Warm ocean water undercuts glaciers that end in the sea. When floating ice shelves break up, the glaciers behind them speed up.
- Lakes and floods. Retreating ice leaves lakes held back by loose ice or rock. These can burst suddenly and flood valleys below.
- Slope failures. Thawing permafrost and losing the ice that buttresses a slope can trigger rock and ice avalanches.
- Rain instead of snow. Higher freezing levels mean rain falls on ice that once stayed frozen.
Who depends on them: close to two billion people live downstream of glacier or snow-fed rivers. Many glaciers pass a peak in meltwater, then river flows fall as the ice runs out.
Weather here is local. Each popup shows the forecast modelled at the ice's own elevation, which can be many degrees colder than the valley below. The ring around a pin () means it is above 0°C there right now.