2025 among the worst years on record for global glacier loss

Using satellite observations, scientists in School of GeoSciences are supporting work to track the accelerating loss of the world’s glaciers, revealing that 2025 ranks among the worst years on record for global ice loss.

Glacier mass-change observations are collected by national monitoring networks and research institutions worldwide and coordinated by the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

Drawing on international datasets, including satellite observations, researchers found that during the 2025 hydrological year, Earth’s glaciers (excluding the vast ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica) lost an estimated 408 billion tonnes of ice. This melt contributed around 1.1mm to global sea-level rise, underlining the growing global impact of glacier loss.

The most significant ice losses were recorded in Western Canada and the USA, Iceland, and Central Europe. Compared to typical conditions over recent decades (1991–2020), some of the most extreme losses occurred in Western Canada and the USA, South Asia (west), and Svalbard. Overall, the largest contributions to global glacier loss came from High Mountain Asia, Alaska, and the Russian Arctic.

2025 was another year in which glaciers continued to melt at a very high rate. To put this into perspective, the annual mass loss from glaciers in 2025 would have filled five Olympic swimming pools every second of the year.

The research forms part of a long-running global collaboration to monitor glacier health and understand how rapidly glaciers are responding to climate change. Edinburgh researchers play a key role in this effort, particularly through the development and application of satellite-based techniques to measure glacier change at regional and global scales.

Edinburgh is contributing to this international effort by providing estimates from satellite observations. The launch of the CRISTAL satellite in 2027 by the European Space Agency and the European Commission will begin a new era in satellite monitoring of glaciers, ensuring that we sustain and expand the decades-long climatic time series from in-situ monitoring services.

To put this into perspective, over the past two decades alone, glaciers have lost approximately 5% of their total volume, with regional losses ranging from 2% on the Antarctic and Subantarctic Islands, to as much as 39% in Central Europe.

Since 1975, glaciers have lost an estimated total of 9,583 billion tonnes of ice, contributing approximately 26.4 mm to global sea-level rise. Strikingly, six of the highest mass-loss years on record have occurred within the past seven years, highlighting just how rapidly this loss is intensifying

The 2025 findings have been published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (Climate Chronicles) and in the European State of the Climate Report 2025, produced by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

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