4,000 global glaciers will disappear annually by 2055 as the planet warms

How quickly the glaciers around the globe will disappear has been quantified by a research team. The approximate prediction of an alarming scenario was done by an international team led by ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, highlighted that the Alps could reach their peak glacier loss rate between 2033 and 2041, with global peak loss occurring about a decade later.
Depending on warming levels, the rate could rise from 2,000 to 4,000 glaciers vanishing annually at the global peak.
The study revealed that the fate of glaciers is closely tied to how much the planet warms.
If global temperatures rise by 2.7C, projections estimate only about 110 glaciers will remain in Central Europe by 2100, just 3 per cent of current Alpine glaciers. A 4C increase could reduce this number to around 20.
Even medium-sized glaciers, like the Rhone Glacier, could shrink to remnants, and the Aletsch Glacier could fragment into smaller sections. Researchers have documented more than 1,000 glacier losses in Switzerland from 1973 to 2016.
Regions with numerous small glaciers at low elevations or near the equator, such as the Alps, Caucasus, Rocky Mountains, Andes, and African mountains, are especially vulnerable.
“In these regions, more than half of all glaciers are expected to vanish within the next ten to twenty years,” said Van Tricht, a researcher at ETH Zurich’s Chair of Glaciology and the WSL.
Using three advanced glacier models and several climate scenarios, the researchers provided detailed forecasts for different mountain regions.
In the Alps, a 1.5C scenario would leave about 430 of today’s 3,000 glaciers by 2100 (12 per cent), while a 2.0C rise leaves around 8 per cent (270 glaciers).
At a 4C increase, only about 1 per cent of 20 glaciers survive.
For comparison, the Rocky Mountains could retain 4,400 glaciers at a 1.5C rise; 25 per cent of today’s 18,000.
The Andes and Central Asia would each lose over 90 per cent of their glaciers in the higher warming scenario. Globally, just 18,000 glaciers would remain at 4C, compared to about 100,000.