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The ice volume of glaciers outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets totals about 158,000 km³, with about 27% less ice in High Mountain Asia than thought, according to multiple models that estimate ice thickness from surface characteristics.

Mass changes in High Mountain Asia's glaciers have been under dispute for almost a decade. An analysis of satellite data archives provides an observation-based mass budget for every single glacier in the region.

Glacier melt sustained water discharge from South America’s mountain basins during a recent severe drought, but summer runoff from glaciers could drop by 48% in future megadroughts, worsening water scarcity, according to analyses of past and projected events.

This works presents an estimate of the contribution of avalanches to the mass balance of all glaciers in the world and its planned evolution throughout the 21st century, as well as the implications for the glacier mass balance and evolution.

Potential gains in future salmon habitat associated with glacier loss have yet to be quantified. This study projects future gains in Pacific salmon freshwater habitat within western North America by linking a model of glacier mass change for 315 glaciers, forced by five different Global Climate Models, with a simple model of salmon stream habitat potential.

Iceberg calving can act as a submarine melt amplifier through excitation of transient internal waves.

Glacierized regions that are projected to become ice-free in this century could provide substantial water storage and hydroelectric power, according to this worldwide theoretical assessment.

Most of the meteorites on the Earth’s surface are found in Antarctica. Here the authors show that ~5,000 meteorites become inaccessible per year as they melt into the ice due to climate change.

Many mountain glaciers will disappear with warming. Here the authors assess how many glaciers will disappear per year under different warming scenarios, finding that a peak in glacier loss will happen during the mid-twenty-first century.

Long-term changes of the mountain glaciers in the Tien Shan, Central Asia, are not well constrained. Remote sensing data and glaciological models reveal a 27% decline of glacier mass from 1961 to 2012, linked to increased summer melting.

Permafrost in Europe’s mountains has warmed by more than 1 °C per decade in certain places, matching the levels in Arctic lowlands. The strongest warming occurred at cold bedrock at the highest elevations and latitudes or after permafrost degraded.

An intercomparison exercise reassesses mass loss from glaciers worldwide based on the main in situ and satellite methods from 2000 to 2023; the results are consistent with previous assessments and provide a refined and comprehensive observational baseline for future impact and modelling studies.

Weakening blocking effect of the High Mountain Asia on the westerlies-carried deficit in precipitation minus evaporation from the southeast North Atlantic is demonstrated, leading to persistent northward expansion of terrestrial water storage deficit in the Tibet Plateau.

Two catastrophic glacier collapse events in western Tibet in 2016 were caused by a convergence of weather and glacier-bed conditions, according to an analysis of observations and modelling.

Analysis of satellite stereo imagery uncovers two decades of mass change for all of Earth’s glaciers, revealing accelerated glacier shrinkage and regionally contrasting changes consistent with decadal climate variability.

Glaciers in the Karakoram region, with their balanced or slightly positive mass balance, stand out from global glacier shrinkage, but this anomaly is not expected to persist in the long term, according to an overview of the possible explanations.

On 28 May 2025, twenty million cubic metres of rock and ice buried the medieval village of Blatten and nearby settlements in the Swiss Lötschen valley. In the wake of the warmest decade since at least 742 CE, the disaster underlines the impact of climate warming on people and heritage.

This Perspective reviews the current understanding of groundwater recharge by meltwater, discusses the scales at which cryosphere–groundwater interactions are relevant, identifies key cryo-hydrogeological processes that need further study, and emphasizes the critical importance of these interactions for current and future water availability in mountain regions.

More than 10,000 locations in High-Mountain Asia are identified as likely to host ice-dammed lakes, responsible for most of the glacier outburst floods in High-Mountain Asia, using a combination of a digital elevation model and a glacier model.