Switzerland's glaciers ran out of winter snow on June 29, the second-earliest date on record

Glacier Loss Day is a calendar date, and only that. GLAMOS defines it as the point where the previous winter's snow is gone and further melting starts eating into the glacier's own mass, until autumn snowfall begins rebuilding the pack ^[2]. Matthias Huss, who heads the network, told Agence France-Presse that this year's date came "three months too early, compared to a healthy state" ^[3]. Counted forward from June 29, that puts a healthy melt-out near the end of September ^[1].

phys.org does not report a 2026 figure for how much ice the summer then removed. For 2022, whose melt-out fell on June 26 ^[2], it puts the loss at about 6% of total glacier mass ^[5]. That is two dates, three days apart in four years, and too few to read a distribution from. The stronger reason to plan for 2022-class years is physical: snow depths in the central European alpine region last winter were among the five lowest in three decades ^[9], and thin snow exposes older, darker ice that absorbs more sunlight than snow and melts faster ^[10].

For a rate, the Rhone Glacier is the closest the record comes. Spread across the 61 days of June and July, its loss of more than 4 meters of thickness works out to at least 6.6 centimeters a day ^[3]. GLAMOS put the July figure at 10 centimeters a day ^[12], roughly half again that two-month average ^[4].

In the Mont Blanc massif, aerial imagery shows meltwater streams running down bare rock alongside the Bossons Glacier, in places where its ice reached the valley floor in the 1980s ^[23]. A hole first spotted in the glacier's lower tongue in 2025 is still visible more than a year later ^[24].

At Tignes, summer skiing on the Grande Motte Glacier normally runs about six weeks in June and July across 19 kilometers of trails ^[17]. Clement Colin, chief executive of Altta, the company that manages the resort's lifts, told France 3 that people "would not be skiing on the glacier for much longer" ^[19]. The resort has put artificial snow machines at the lower perimeters ^[20], and still plans to open for the winter season at the end of November ^[21].

Downstream, the timing counts for more than the total. The melt raises early-season runoff, which is useful during central Europe's current drought ^[15]. phys.org reports that the Rhone can no longer sustain the flow volumes communities farther downstream have long depended on in mid- and late summer ^[22], and that the catchment is likely to face severe water security problems in the late-summer months, once glacial ice no longer contributes much to streamflow ^[16]. That projection is conditional on the glacier continuing to melt as forecast ^[16].