Switzerland’s glaciers could reach a crucial tipping point today

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Switzerland’s glaciers are melting at an alarming pace due to the current European heatwave. The Swiss Glacier Monitoring Service predicts that all the snow and ice that accumulated last winter will have melted by today, a moment called “glacier loss day”, when only long-term ice is exposed and the formations start to shrink. This tipping point usually arrives in mid-August. Around the world, glaciers are melting at a rate roughly equivalent to three Olympic swimming pools of water a second. Europe is the worst-affected continent, with the glaciers in the Alps and the Pyrenees receding by some 40% in the past 25 years. They are at risk of all but disappearing by 2100. This would have a huge knock-on effect on the continent’s broader geography: the Rhine, the Danube and other great European rivers are fed by glacier melts.