Earth’s glaciers, separate from the continental ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, experienced a net mass loss of 408 ± 132 Gt during the hydrological year 2025, equivalent to 1.1 ± 0.4 mm sea-level rise. In this year, regional area-averaged mass loss was largest in Western Canada and the USA, Iceland, and Central Europe, with the largest anomalies from the climate period (1991−2020) in Western Canada and USA, South Asia West, and Svalbard. Regional contributions to global mass loss in 2025 were largest from High Mountain Asia, Alaska, and the Russian Arctic.

“2025 was another year in which glaciers continued to melt at a very high rate”, says Michael Zemp, Director WGMS and corresponding author of the study. “To put this into perspective, the annual mass loss from glaciers in 2025 would have filled five Olympic pools in every second of that year”.

Global glacier mass loss has accelerated from less than 100 Gt per year in 1976−1995 (with occasional years of modest mass gain), to around 230 Gt per year in 1996−2015, and 390 Gt per year in 2016−2025. Since 1975, glacier mass loss has totalled 9,583 ± 1,211 Gt, equivalent to 26.4 ± 3.3 mm of sea-level rise, with six of the highest mass-loss years on record occurring in the past seven years.

Glacier mass-change observations were acquired by national networks and research institutions and compiled by the WGMS. Applying geostatistical modelling (Dussaillant et al. 2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1977-2025), annual anomalies from in situ observations were combined with long-term trends from remote sensing to produce regional and global estimates of glacier mass changes.

The results for the hydrological year 2025 were published in the Climate Chronicles of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (WGMS Network 2026) and in the European State of the Climate Report 2025, compiled by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Figure | Global glacier mass change for hydrological years 1976−2025.
a, Global glacier mass change for hydrological years 1976−2025. Coloured bars indicate years with positive (blue) and negative (red) annual mass changes and highlight the results of 2025 (dark red). Decadal mass-change rates (Gt yr−1) are labelled above the x-axis. The dashed black line indicates a mass change (362.5 Gt) equivalent to 1 mm sea-level rise. b, Cumulative global glacier mass change (yellow line with shaded uncertainty at 95% confidence interval; left) and regional contributions (stacked bars, sorted by amount; right) since 1975. For both subplots, mass change is given in Gt (left y-axis) and mm sea-level equivalent (right y-axis), with the blue dashed line indicating the total cumulative mass loss 1976−2025. c, Regional glacier mass change (kg m−2) for the hydrological year 2025 aggregated for tiles of 2° latitude and longitude, shown for the 19 first-order glacier regions (numbers in parentheses) and selected sub-regions (letters). Discs scale with the glacierized area and are coloured according to area-averaged mass change. Data from WGMS (2026). Map design following Hugonnet et al. (2021, Fig. 2). In 2025, glaciers continued to lose mass in all regions, with the global mass change ranking as the sixth-most negative on record.

Source: The WGMS Network (2026), Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-026-00777-z
Note that the reuse of this figure requires permission from the publisher: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-026-00777-z#rightslink

References

Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 2026: European State of the Climate 2025. https://climate.copernicus.eu/ESOTC

The WGMS Network: Zemp, M., Welty, E., Nussbaumer, S., Bannwart, J., Gärtner-Roer, I., Wells, A., Ahlstrøm, A., Anderson, B., Andreassen, L., Azam, M., Barnett, J., Baroni, C., Barrand, N., Bauder, A., Bernard, E., Berthier, E., Bertolotti, G., Bolch, T., Bonnefoy-Demongeot, M., Braun, M., Burgess, D., Cáceres, B., Cappelletti, D., Carrivick, J., Carturan, L., Cat Berro, D., Ceballos, J., Cobos, G., Cruz, R., Cullen, N., Dahlkvist, J., Dávila, L., de Villiers, S., Demberel, O., Dinale, R., Drozdov, E., Dussaillant, I., Elagina, N., Elvehøy, H., Erofeev, A., Falaschi, D., Fischer, A., Fischer, M., Florentine, C., Fujita, K., Galos, S., Garcia, A., Gourmelen, N., Grosso, F., Gubanov, A., Gunnarsson, A., Guyez, A., Hartl, L., Hoelzle, M., Huenante, J., Hugonnet, R., Huss, M., Hynek, B., Imazu, T., Iturraspe, R., Jakob, L., Joshi, S., Karimi, N., Kirchner, N., Kjøllmoen, B., Kohler, J. ,Kutuzov, S., Lavrentiev, I., Lea, J., Lendvai, A., Li, H., Li, S., Li, Z., Linsbauer, A., Marinsek, S., Mattea, E., Mayer, C., McNeil, C., Mercalli, L., Messerli, A., Michael, C., Morra di Cella, U., Navarro, F., Navruzshoev, H., Neureiter, A., Nosenko, G., Pálsson, F., Pecci, M., Pelto, M., Popovnin, V., Prinz, R., Puigdomenech, C., Purdie, H., Rossotto, A., Ruiz, L., Sass, L., Schytt Mannerfelt, E., Scotti, R., Shangguan, D., Shepherd, B., Six, D., Smirnov, A., Sobota, I., Strudl, M., Sugiyama, S., Thibert, E., Thomson, L., Thorsteinsson, T., Tielidze, L., Tolle, F., Toropov, P., Tuccella, P., Umirzakov, G., Usubaliev, R., Vargo, L., Yang, W., and Zagel, B. (2026): Global glacier mass change in 2025. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 7, p. 213-215. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-026-00777-z Online PDF: https://rdcu.be/fb6iD