Planet Earth Hurtling Toward Peak Glacier Extinction

The world's glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate. A new study is giving more concrete information about when the planet will reach what is known as "peak glacier extinction."

New Study Highlights Specific Numeric Loss of Glaciers

Climatologists and environmentalists gathered in 2019 in Switzerland to bid farewell to Pizol, a glacier that had been around for about 700 years before it finally gave in to the impacts of climate change. Pizol is not the only glacier that has been reduced to a puddle of scattered ice chunks in recent years.

Thousands of glaciers have been lost to the warming planet over the last few decades, with experts warning that this number is only going to accelerate. A new study published last week in Nature Climate Change detailed that the number of glaciers melting into nothing will peak at up to 4,000 each year by the middle of the century. To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent of losing all of the glaciers that dot the landscape of the European Alps in only one year.

Past studies have primarily focused on the amount of surface area of ice lost from glaciers as the mercury soars. However, this latest research looked at changes to the total number of glaciers rather than the surface area.