New Website Lets Anyone Look Up When Their Glacier Will Disappear

Scientists have launched the Global Glacier Extinction Explorer, a new interactive website that lets anyone explore the projected future of individual glaciers around the world. Users can check whether, and approximately when, a specific glacier is projected to disappear under different levels of global warming. The platform builds on a study in the journal Nature Climate Change, led by ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, providing the first global assessment of individual glacier disappearance.

"Global numbers such as glacier mass or area loss can feel very abstract. With this website, people can zoom into their own valley or mountain region and see what different levels of global warming could mean for the glaciers they know," said Lander Van Tricht of ETH Zurich and VUB, the study's lead author, who developed the website with Kristof Van Tricht of VITO Remote Sensing.

The launch comes at a difficult moment for European glaciers: preliminary observations suggest 2026 could be one of the worst years for Alpine glaciers since systematic measurements began, driven by low winter snow and repeated summer heat waves. Switzerland's Bella Tola Glacier was declared extinct in August 2026, closely matching the study's projection of 2026-2029; Urirotstock Glacier was also declared extinct this summer.

The underlying study introduced the concept of 'peak glacier extinction,' the period when the annual number of disappearing glaciers reaches its maximum. Under 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, around 2,000 glaciers a year are projected to disappear globally at peak extinction, roughly doubling under 4 degrees. By 2100, nearly half of today's glaciers could remain at 1.5 degrees of warming, compared with about 20% at 2.7 degrees and fewer than 10% at 4 degrees; in the European Alps, only around 110 glaciers may remain at 2.7 degrees, and as few as 20 at 4 degrees.

"Every fraction of a degree matters," Van Tricht said, noting that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could preserve more than twice as many glaciers as a 2.7-degree trajectory by 2100. The extinction years on the website are not exact predictions, since individual glaciers respond differently depending on their size, elevation and local climate, but offer an estimate of when a glacier is likely to disappear.