Just in the last year, world glaciers lost six times the volume of Lake Taupō

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2026-04-09 13:20

New Zealand; International

Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Close to 8% of the glacier ice the world had in 1975 is gone, a new study estimates. The research team, including NZers, found that world glaciers - not including the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland - lost around 400 billion tonnes in the year to September 2025. They also looked at how fast the glaciers were melting, finding the six worst years on record happened in the past seven years. It's the 4th year in a row that glaciers all over the world lost ice, and the "exceptionally high" rate recently means some regions could entirely lose their glaciers in a few decades, the researchers say.

News release

From:

Dr Lauren Vargo, Glaciologist at the Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, and an author of this paper, comments:

"Measurements made for New Zealand as a part of this study show that the ~3,000 New Zealand glaciers did lose mass, though it was not a record high melt year. While there have been years of mass loss alternated with mass gain throughout most of the record (1976 — 2015), we've now had 10 years of almost continuous mass loss, with this past year adding to that. So it almost seems like a bit of a shift in how our glaciers are changing.

"I've been working on Brewster Glacier over the past 10 years, and it's changed a lot - it's had a ~25% decrease in area (from 2 to 1.5 km²) and has thinned by an average of ~20 vertical meters."

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Research Springer Nature, Web page

Journal/
conference: Nature Reviews Earth & Environment

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Victoria University of Wellington, University of Otago, University of Canterbury, Monash University

Funder: The WGMS is operated thanks to long-term support from the Department of Geography, University of Zurich, and the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) within the framework of GCOS Switzerland. The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), as a programme of the European Union implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), supports the operational computation of the global gridded glacier mass-change product. We are grateful for the support that our national correspondents and principal investigators have received from their national institutions and project sponsors.

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