Earth’s glaciers are continuing to shrink at alarming rates, with new international research revealing that 2025 was among the worst years on record for global ice loss. Published in the Climate Chronicles collection of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the study provides the latest global assessment of glacier mass change, showing an accelerating trend driven by rising temperatures.

The findings reveal that glaciers worldwide lost an estimated 408 gigatonnes of ice in 2025, marking the sixth most negative year since records began in 1975. The past decade has seen a dramatic acceleration in ice loss, with annual losses nearly four times higher than those observed in the late 20th century.