Triglav Glacier, located roughly 17 kilometers (10 miles) south-southeast of the tripoint between Austria, Italy, and Slovenia, may be days away from being nothing more than a memory. Sitting on the shaded northern side of Mount Triglav at around 2,470 meters (8,100 feet) above sea level, the glacier is one of the last in Slovenia.
Once a fixture of Slovenian alpinism, as well as a popular summer ski spot, the Triglav Glacier has been reduced to a mere patch of ice in recent years, thanks to a slew of hot European summers amid human-caused global warming. In the late 1800s, the glacier covered nearly 40 hectares (99 acres) of Slovenian mountainside. By 1946, climate change had already caused it to shrink to about 14 hectares (35 acres). The shrinkage has continued and even accelerated in recent years, and today the glacier covers less than 0.2 hectares (0.5 acres).
In fact, for years now, the Slovenian ice mass has not functioned as an actual glacier, which moves, buckles, and flows under the force of gravity. Instead, Triglav Glacier has functioned more as a year-round hunk of frozen water, as crevasses have ceased to exist and ice has stopped accumulating.
Miha Pavšek of the Anton Melik Geographical Institute at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, who has studied the glacier for 30 years, now says that Triglav Glacier’s days are numbered — literally. According to Pavšek, the last fragments of what was once a mighty Alpine glacier will melt before the beginning of winter. “It’s highly likely that by the end of the melting season we will be left without any ice in the area that we have known for generations as the Triglav Glacier,” Pavšek said.
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This year’s conditions left the glacier with little chance. According to the Slovenian government, the winter brought “particularly little snow.” Maximum snow depth at the Kredarica weather station, in the Julian Alps near the summit of Mount Triglav, reached just 220 centimeters (87 inches), well below the 1991 to 2020 average of 374 centimeters (147 inches). That is roughly 41 percent less snow than normal. In a typical year about 1.5 meters (5 feet) of snow is still on the ground at the station on June 1. This year the last day with snow cover there was May 31.
A thin snowpack leaves ice exposed to the sun earlier, and summer then did its part. Slovenian officials cite “exceptionally high summer temperatures” as a factor in the glacier’s final decline. The longer trend is also clear: Kredarica’s median annual temperature stayed below freezing from 1955 to 1999, but has been above freezing in 10 years since 2011, and consistently since 2022. The Alps are warming two to three times faster than the global average, according to the same source.
Triglav is not a unique case but rather one casualty of many to come. Climate change has caused glacial recession across the globe, but for various reasons, Europe has felt its effects perhaps more intensely than anywhere else in the world. Just this past year, thanks to low snowfall and a series of summer heat waves, Switzerland’s glaciers declined by 5.5%. The Matterhorn, an emblem of winter sports, recreation, and beauty, is now nearly devoid of snow.
The Swiss glacier monitoring service GLAMOS now states that, under current conditions, Alpine glaciers “have no chance of surviving in the long term.” This is tragic news not only for summer skiers and glacier enthusiasts, but also for those who rely on mountain glaciers for drinking water and irrigation. Declining glaciers may lower water flows, jeopardizing supplies that people have relied on for millennia.
Regardless of the fate of other areas around the Alps, what’s clear is that the once-renowned Triglav Glacier will imminently become a thing of the past—if it isn’t already. Hopefully, other glaciers in Europe and around the world won’t meet such a dire fate. However, as of today, their futures look undeniably grim, especially given our lackluster efforts to turn this ship around before it’s too late.
