The end of the eternal snow

The golden years

In the decades after the war the high glaciers were systematically opened up for summer skiing. The ice was considerably larger and reached further down, so far more terrain was skiable than today. Skiing in June and July was taken for granted at numerous glaciers.

Worth noting: the 1970s were a comparatively cool, snow-rich phase. At some glaciers the lift installations were buried by snow and migrated ever deeper into the ice until they disappeared. Those same installations are now reappearing, exposed by the melt.

The turn came towards the end of the 1970s and more strongly from the 1980s. Rising summer temperatures began reliably melting away the thin layer of snow over the glacier ice, and that was the beginning of the end of a broad summer ski offering.

Why altitude no longer protects

What matters for summer skiing is not the air temperature at the summit but whether a load-bearing layer of snow lies on the ice. That layer is disappearing earlier and earlier.

The Swiss glacier area roughly halved between 1973 and 2016, and of some 2150 counted glaciers around 750 vanished entirely. Terrain below 3000 metres is increasingly ice-free. The pace is increasing too: between 1970 and 2000 the Alpine glaciers lost about one per cent of their volume a year, since 2000 it has been two to three per cent. The two hot years 2022 and 2023 alone cost around a tenth of the remaining ice mass.

The decisive figure for skiing is the freezing level. In Switzerland it has risen by 200 to 700 metres since measurements began, most strongly in spring and summer. Once it passes 4000 metres, even the highest glaciers get rain instead of snow.

The consequence: the protective snow cover melts away, bare glacier ice is exposed, and crevasses open. No piste can be safely groomed over open crevasses. On top of that the glacier moves and shifts the lift pylons with it. That is why resorts give up summer operation years before the snow actually runs out.

The years it broke

What comes next

For 2026 El Niño is confirmed. NOAA issued an El Niño advisory in June with an elevated probability of a very strong event into the winter. For the European summer, though, El Niño works only indirectly: the drivers of Alpine heat are the warm background climate signal and the warm seas around Europe.

The long-term picture is unambiguous. Glaciologists expect the Alpine glaciers to melt almost completely within this century. By 2050 well over half of the glacier area present in 2000 is likely to be gone. The IPCC notes that smaller glaciers, such as those in the Alps, will largely disappear almost regardless of the emissions pathway, because large ice masses respond with decades of delay.

What that means in practice: summer skiing becomes a niche for very high terrain. The shift is already visible commercially too. When Hintertux announced its summer pause it named weak demand alongside the snow. In summer, guests increasingly want hiking, biking and family offerings rather than skiing.

Forecasts carry uncertainty. Seasonal weather forecasts give probabilities, not certainties, and how a glacier actually develops depends on the snow base and the heatwaves of the particular year.

Sources

Glaciers and climate: GLAMOS / ETH Zurich (M. Huss), Austrian Academy of Sciences (L. Hartl), IPCC, Wikipedia on glacier retreat since 1850. Summer ski areas and chronicle: Wikipedia, Enviadi, SnowOnline, Schneehöhen, Snowplaza. Season and operation: Zermatt Bergbahnen / Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, S.I.F.A.S. (Passo Stelvio), Zillertaler Gletscherbahn (Hintertux), Bergfex. Weather and forecasts: NOAA Climate Prediction Center, WMO, ECMWF / Copernicus.

This page is an explanatory compilation. Years mark the end of summer operation. Season data, snow depths and forecasts depend on weather and snow conditions and can change at short notice. Before travelling, always check the resort’s own status. The historical chapters draw on our report “The end of the eternal snow” of 22 June 2026; the “today” section is calculated from our own dataset each time the page is built.