Two catastrophic years have obliterated 10% of Swiss glacier volumes, with one extreme year following another. Glaciers in Switzerland lost 6% of their volume in 2022 while 2023 saw 4% destroyed, representing the second largest decline since measurements began.

The World Meteorological Organisation is warning that the summer of 2020 will leave a deep wound in the cryosphere, with a major impact on ice shelves and glaciers in the Northern hemisphere.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is getting ready to publish a special report on the ocean and cryosphere – the frozen parts of the planet – later this morning.

A new UK-U.S. Antarctic research programme to improve the prediction of future sea-level rise was launched yesterday at British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Cambridge to discover whether the collapse of a huge Antarctic glacier could raise global sea levels by as much as a metre by the end of this century.