Extreme heat is changing the Alps at a speed that even researchers with decades of experience say they have never seen before. Since 2000, the area of glaciers across the entire Alpine range has shrunk by 39%, and the summer of 2026 is giving even more worrying signs.
The data comes from Legambiente's "Glacier Caravan", the monitoring that the organization conducts every year on the main peaks of the Alps together with the Italian Glaciology Foundation and CIPRA, the Italian branch of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps.
Vanda Bonardo, head of the Alps at Legambiente, has just returned from monitoring the Vanoise glacier in the French Alps. Even at 2,500 meters above sea level, the temperatures are so high that fieldwork is carried out in shorts and short sleeves.
The numbers show the scale of the phenomenon. Since 2000, the Alps have lost 39% of their ice surface. Worldwide, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, which published a report in Nature, an average of 273 billion tons of ice has melted each year since 2000. This amount is equivalent to the water that the world's population consumes in 30 years. And the pace is accelerating: in 2025 alone, 408 billion tons of ice were lost.
“Glaciers seem motionless and silent,” explains Bonardo. “In fact, they speak to us, with the sound of water flowing where there was once ice, and the sound of crevasses that make walking increasingly dangerous, forcing the closure of many trails.”
Many alpine glaciers have already disappeared. According to Legambiente, all those below 3,500 meters are expected to disappear by 2050. Calderone, the only glacier in the Apennines, was the first to lose its glacier status in 2000. In 2022, Flua on Monte Rosa disappeared, and a year later, Trobio.
The consequences are not limited to the loss of ice. In 2025, what was left of the Birch glacier in Switzerland collapsed on the village of Blatten, which had fortunately been evacuated earlier. Today, another Swiss village, Kandersteg, is under threat from the increasingly unstable Spitze Stei massif. The area is being constantly monitored and evacuation plans are in place, although an immediate collapse is not currently anticipated.
The most dramatic view comes from the Forni glacier in Italy. Claudio Smiraglia, a professor of glaciology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, has been studying it for 65 years. From Bormio, at 1,200 meters above sea level, where the afternoon temperature reached 34 degrees, he says he no longer recognizes the glacier he has followed his entire career.
"We had already used the expression annus horribilis for 2022. But I had never seen a season like this in my entire career. The furnace had already split into three parts, now a fourth part is breaking away. It is a color between gray and black. I don't recognize it anymore. I have run out of words to describe such a dramatic situation," says Smiraglia.
The situation has also hit one of the symbols of summer in the Alps: glacier skiing. In mid-August, Stelvio, the only place in Europe where summer skiing continued, was forced to close its slopes due to a lack of snow. Earlier, the same thing had happened in Cervino, where Italian champion Federica Brignone released a video of the gray slopes, accompanied by the music of the movie "Titanic".
The paradox is that, as the glaciers retreat, the mountains are attracting more and more visitors. The lifts to Forni continue to operate and, according to Smiraglia, are filled with tourists seeking the coolness of the heights to escape the heat.
Even a winter of heavy rainfall in the western Alps failed to curb the phenomenon. Experts had hoped that the new layer of snow would protect the ice over the summer, but monitoring in Vanoise showed that the heat had already melted it.
Throughout the summer, the level where the temperature reaches zero degrees has fluctuated between 4,000 and 5,000 meters of altitude.
"What could we expect?" asks Bonardo.
For researchers, what is happening in the Alps is no longer simply the gradual retreat of glaciers. It is the transformation, within a few decades, of a landscape that for centuries has been considered unchanging.
