Slovenia’s Triglav glacier has disappeared after a record hot summer, the Guardian reported on 27 October. It lost 93 per cent of its surface area between 1983 and 2003, and its last remnant was only a few metres across by the end of summer.
Slovenia still has one glacier, Skuta, which is better shaded and expected to last a few more years. Triglav appears on the country’s coat of arms, so the loss is cultural as well as environmental.
Retreating Ice Returns Old Weapons and Relics
In the Dolomites, Italy’s Julia Alpine Brigade recovered and defused 250 explosives this summer, including 18 Italian 75mm artillery shells and 37 French-made Thevetot mortar bombs, the Guardian reported.
Hikers had reported bombs near Canal San Bovo in the Primiero Valley, and the army then searched high-altitude and glacier sites across Trentino-Alto Adige. The munitions date from the White War, fought between Italy and Austria-Hungary from 1915 to 1918.
As Alpine glaciers retreated from the 1990s, other relics emerged, including shelters, sleds, letters, diaries and bodies. In Switzerland, the “Treasury of Ice” exhibition at Lucerne’s Glacier Garden shows a Bronze Age bow and arrowheads from the Lötschen Pass, a Roman statuette and a rosary. It brings glacier archaeology and ice-core research together for the first time, swissinfo reported.
Discovery Comes With Destruction
Frozen ground preserves organic material that would normally rot, but finds begin to deteriorate once they meet air, water and microbes. Swiss glaciologists reported that Switzerland lost 5.5 per cent of its glacier volume in 2026, the second-biggest decline on record, and nearly a fifth in five years. The ice also holds a climate record, which is why the Lucerne exhibition pairs the finds with ice cores.
Triglav’s retreat is exposing carbonate crusts that formed under the ice, with dates reaching back to the last ice age, the Slovenian government said. Researchers must document what appears before weather and erosion destroy it, while accepting that the glacier itself cannot be saved. That makes glacier archaeology a race, not a dividend.
Central Asia’s Water Is Running Out
A new assessment by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published on 22 October, says Central Asian glaciers could lose up to 85 per cent of their volume by 2100. For now, glacier-fed rivers carry extra meltwater, which temporarily increases supply. By 2050, depending on the scenario, July-to-September river volumes could fall by up to 50 per cent, in the growing season.
Irrigated agriculture takes up to 92 per cent of water withdrawals in some countries, and upstream regions rely on hydropower for most of their electricity. Shifting river flows will therefore sharpen competition between irrigation, energy and the sharing of water across borders, the institute says. A shrinking glacier can turn into a diplomatic problem.
Antarctica Raises the Stakes
A study published in Nature Communications on 12 October by Mattia Poinelli and colleagues found that seawater reaches several kilometres beneath Thwaites Glacier’s grounded ice. Their model projects up to 30 millimetres of sea-level rise from Thwaites by 2100, roughly double earlier estimates of about 15 millimetres, even without additional warming. It also puts the chance that Thwaites loses contact with an underwater ridge that currently helps restrain it at 60 per cent by 2100.
Thwaites is roughly the size of Great Britain and already accounts for about 4 per cent of global sea-level rise, IBTimes reported. An Alpine glacier’s loss changes a mountainside and a water supply, while Antarctic ice loss changes coastlines thousands of kilometres away. An artefact in Switzerland draws visitors to a museum, but Thwaites could eventually alter where millions of people live.
Greenland Tests the Gold Rush Idea
Melting is also drawing political attention to the Arctic. On 7 September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a €200 million EU package for Greenland covering critical minerals, satellite communications and renewable energy, as US President Donald Trump presses claims on the island. The Commission has also proposed raising EU funding for Greenland from €225 million to €530 million for 2028-2034.
Yet the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland says the ice sheet covers about 80 per cent of the island, and its retreat is not fast enough to expose significant new land for mineral exploration soon. Warming can improve access without making Arctic extraction easy, so geopolitics, more than melting, explains the attention. None of these discoveries offsets the loss of the glaciers themselves. Slovenia gained bare rock and a record of the ice age in its carbonate crusts, but it could not recover its glacier.
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