Glaciers Vanishing Fast – 273 Billion Tons of Ice Lost Annually

Glacier mass balance intercomparison exercise

As of the year 2000, glaciers—excluding the continental ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica—covered an area of 705,221 km² and held approximately 121,728 billion tons of ice worldwide. Since then, glaciers have lost about 5% of their total ice mass, with regional losses ranging from 2% in the Antarctic and Subantarctic Islands to as much as 39% in Central Europe.

On average, glaciers have been losing 273 billion tons (273 trillion kg) of ice per year. This annual loss increased by 36% between the first half of the period (2000–2011) and the second half (2012–2023). The total ice loss from glaciers is approximately 18% greater than the ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and more than double that of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Worldwide research community effort

For the new study, an international research team under the coordination of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), hosted at the University of Zurich (UZH) in Switzerland, carried out the so-called Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE). The research community collected, homogenized, combined, and analyzed glacier mass changes from different field and satellite observation methods.