Global Glacier Extinction Explorer

Sep 11, 2026 10:58 PM - 2 days ago 2

Glacier changes are traditionally quantified successful position of full (regional) wide and area loss, but such metrics do not afloat seizure the disappearance of individual glaciers. Yet each glacier, nary matter how small, tin matter. Beyond their publication to sea-level emergence aliases location h2o resources, glaciers hold important cultural, ecological, and societal value, often profoundly rooted successful section landscapes and communities. In the discourse of the UN International Year of Glacier Preservation (2025), this study truthful shifts the attraction towards the destiny of individual glaciers worldwide.

To measure glacier extinction, 2 complementary criteria are used. A glacier is considered disappeared (extinct) erstwhile its area drops beneath 0.01 km², accordant pinch commonly utilized inventory thresholds, aliases erstwhile its remaining measurement falls beneath 1% of its first value, indicating that only a negligible crystal assemblage persists. To deduce measurement and area trajectories for each glacier, 3 global glacier models (GloGEM, OGGM, PyGEM) are used, mixed pinch aggregate General Circulation Models and emanation scenarios corresponding to projected somesthesia increases of +1.5°C, +2.0°C, +2.7°C, and +4.0°C. All trajectories are past mixed to find median extinction years, as good arsenic Q25 and Q75 ranges (i.e. the 25% and 75% probability intervals). These results are shown on the map.

Extinction is defined comparative to the first glacier outlines from the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI v6.0). Glacier fragmentation during retreat is not accounted for; each remaining crystal within the original glacier grade is treated arsenic portion of the aforesaid glacier.

Data sources

Extinction projections: Van Tricht, L., Zekollari, H., Huss, M. et al. Peak glacier extinction successful the mid-twenty-first century. Nature Climate Change 16, 143–147 (2026). doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02513-9
Regional and glacier-specific results (including those shown here) are publicly disposable connected Zenodo: doi:10.5281/zenodo.17371641
Glacier outlines: RGI Consortium (2017). Randolph Glacier Inventory — A Dataset of Global Glacier Outlines, Version 6. Boulder, Colorado USA. NSIDC: National Snow and Ice Data Center. doi:10.7265/4m1f-gd79
Ice volume: Farinotti, D., Huss, M., Fürst, J. J., Landmann, J., Machguth, H., Maussion, F., and Pandit, A.: A statement estimate for the crystal thickness distribution of each glaciers connected Earth. Nat. Geosci., 12, 168–173, doi:10.1038/s41561-019-0300-3 , 2019.

Acknowledgements

This exertion is built connected open-source software: MapLibre GL JS (map rendering), PMTiles (vector tile streaming), GeoPandas and NumPy (data processing), GDAL / ogr2ogr (tile generation), and go-pmtiles (tile packaging). The web exertion was designed and built by K. Van Tricht, pinch the assistance of Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-6 Astra for the frontend codification and data pipeline structure.