‘Explosion of melt rates’: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years

Alpine regions in Europe experiencing extreme glacier collapse due to heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel pollution Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say.

Swiss glaciers shrank by 5. 5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching…