Since Stelvio stopped operating on 15 August and no ski area in the Alps offers summer skiing any more, one question keeps coming up: wasn’t 2022 far worse?
The answer is a clear no, and it is still not the whole story.
The short answer
Matthias Huss, head of the Swiss glacier monitoring network GLAMOS, addressed it on 11 August 2026:
It is unlikely that we will catch up, but 2026 is, at present, clearly in second place.
2022 remains the record year. The final figure for 2026 will only be settled at the end of September, once the field measurements are done. Until then: the second-worst summer since records began, not the worst.
The figures side by side
| 2022 | 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Ice loss | around 6 % of Swiss volume | clearly second, final figure end of September |
| Glacier loss day | 26 June, earliest ever measured | 29 June, second earliest |
| Freezing level | 5184 m on 25 July, record since 1954 | at times just below 5000 m |
| Snow the previous May | thin cover after a snow-poor winter | 25 % below the 2010 to 2020 mean |
| Summer skiing in the Alps | Hintertux ran throughout | nothing open |
To put the six per cent in context: a “bad” year before 2022 cost 1 to 2 per cent.
Where 2026 does stand worse
Second place sounds like reassurance. In one respect it is the opposite.
The starting point was worse. In early May 2026 there was a quarter less snow on Swiss glaciers than there normally is at the end of winter. Snow cover is not a detail, it is the sunscreen: white snow reflects radiation, bare ice absorbs it. Start May with a quarter less of it and the protection is gone weeks earlier.
Huss calls the combination of a snow-poor winter and repeated heatwaves the “worst case” for glaciers. That it still came out only second says more about how extreme 2022 was than about 2026 being mild.
Individual glaciers have disappeared entirely. The Bella Tola glacier and the Urirotstock glacier no longer exist. On the Rhone glacier, around 19 billion litres of water drained from long-term reserves since mid-June, with up to 10 centimetres of ice thickness a day at lower elevations.
The percentage trap
Here is the point percentages hide.
Six per cent in 2022 and, say, five per cent in 2026 are not comparable, because the base has changed. 2022 and 2023 together cost about a tenth of the remaining ice. Whatever melts in 2026 melts from a markedly smaller remainder.
Put differently: second place on a shrunken base is not half as bad as first. It is bad in a different way. The percentage falls, the absolute loss falls with it, and the glacier is closer to the end regardless.
For skiing, 2026 is unambiguously worse
And here the relationship inverts.
2022 was the worse glacier summer, and the disruption to skiing was severe: Zermatt suspended summer skiing for around 50 days, Stelvio stood still for two months in the middle of high summer, Les 2 Alpes closed on 10 July, Val d’Isère never opened its glacier, Tignes cut its season short on 25 July.
Even so, you could ski in August 2022, on the Hintertux glacier, which that year ran its last full 365 days without a single pause.
2026 is the second-worst summer, and nothing at all is running.
Why that is not a contradiction
Because the two figures measure two different things.
Ice loss measures the climate. The ski offering measures a commercial decision that responds to the climate but not only to it. On ending year-round operation at Hintertux, the Zillertal glacier lift company names demand in high summer, not snow, as the main reason.
That matters for reading the headline correctly. That nobody is skiing in the Alps this August is a genuine first. But it describes the offering, not the state of the glaciers. The two coincide this summer without being the same thing.
The honest sentence is therefore: 2026 is the second-worst year for the ice and the worst ever for ski operations. Quote only one of the two and you are shortening the story.
What will be settled at the end of September
A glacier year’s mass balance is not decided in August but after the September field measurements. Three things become clear then:
- The final loss for 2026, and whether second place holds.
- The exact glacier loss day. 29 June is a model calculation that the measurements may still shift by a few days.
- Whether autumn saves anything. Early snow in September lays down a protective layer and ends the melt season; without it, melting runs into October.
We will update this piece as soon as the figures are in.
Sources
- Matthias Huss, head of GLAMOS, ETH Zurich, quoted 11 August 2026: 2022 remains the record year, 2026 currently clearly second, final assessment at the end of September. Also the figures for the Rhone glacier, Bella Tola and Urirotstock, and the “worst case” characterisation.
- GLAMOS / ETH Zurich, mass balances: around 6 per cent volume loss in 2022, around 4 per cent in 2023, together about a tenth of the remaining ice.
- Glacier loss day 2026: 29 June, from the GLAMOS model calculation; in early May there was a quarter less snow on the glaciers nationwide than is usual at the end of winter.
- MeteoSwiss: freezing level of 5184 metres on 25 July 2022, the highest value ever measured.
- On the 2022 operating suspensions see our piece Why 2022 was the collapse summer, and on the end of year-round skiing Hintertux gives up year-round skiing.
As of 14 August 2026. All 2026 figures are provisional, because the glacier year is still running.
