Hundreds gathered to say goodbye when 700-year-old Pizol died. The funeral in Switzerland in 2019 was solemn. Mourners wore black; flowers were laid; a priest spoke. It was a symbolic moment: Pizol had been a glacier, but human-driven climate change had reduced it to some scattered chunks of ice.Pizol is far from the first glacier death. Thousands have vanished over the past few decades and as the world continues to heat up, they are expected to disappear at an increasing pace. New research gives a glimpse of just how quickly that might happen, and it’s stark.By the middle of the century, the number of glaciers disappearing is set to peak at up to 4,000 a year, if humans keep pumping out climate pollution, according to a study published Monday in Nature Climate Change. That’s equivalent to losing all the glaciers in the European Alps in just one year.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementResearch has tended to focus on the total amount or area of ice lost from glaciers as temperatures tick upward, rather than changes to their total number. This is partly because the number of glaciers is a less clearly defined metric. It depends on assessments of what constitutes a glacier and current inventories sometimes struggle to detect smaller or debris-covered ice bodies. Best estimates say there are currently more than 200,000 glaciers on Earth.But the study authors say knowing where and when individual glaciers will vanish is important. It shows “climate change does not just lead to some ice melt, but it leads to the complete extinction of many glaciers,” said Matthias Huss, a study author and a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who spoke at Pizol’s funeral back in 2019.A man faces the Pizol range as he arrives for a symbolic farewell ceremony to mark the disappearance of the Pizol glacier on September 22, 2019 above Mels, eastern Switzerland. – Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty ImagesThe glacier tongue of Morteratsch Glacier in Switzerland. The world’s glaciers are disappearing at an accelerating rate as the planet heats up. – Lander Van TrichtThe scientists looked at the planet’s glaciers using a global database to pin down “peak glacier extinction,” meaning the period during which the largest number of glaciers disappear.They used models to determine when each individual glacier would become too small to be classified as a glacier: defined as when its area falls below 0.01 square kilometers (0.4 square miles), or it reaches less than 1% of its initial volume, as measured around …
