# Every glacier gets its own death date

> A new map tracks not just melting ice, but the year each individual glacier on Earth disappears for good.
- Title: Every glacier gets its own death date · Glacierextinction
- Summary: A new map tracks not just melting ice, but the year each individual glacier on Earth disappears for good. Regional mass-loss numbers hide the real story…
- Keywords: glaciers, climate, sea level, mapping, climate models, technology, startups, Every, glacier, gets, own, death
- Source: Glacierextinction — https://glacierextinction.com
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: glaciers, climate, sea level, mapping, climate models, technology, startups
## Ice loss, one glacier at a time
Climate reporting usually counts glacier loss as regional mass and area totals. That framing erases the fate of each individual glacier, including the small ones.

> every glacier, no matter how small, can matter
## Glaciers are more than water
Beyond feeding rivers and raising sea levels, glaciers carry cultural, ecological and social weight, tied to the communities living beneath them.

> glaciers hold important cultural, ecological, and societal value
## When is a glacier dead
Two tests define extinction. Area falling under 0.01 square kilometres, or volume dropping below 1% of where it started, leaving only a scrap of ice.
## Three models, four futures
GloGEM, OGGM and PyGEM each project volume and area paths, run across multiple climate models and warming scenarios of +1.5, +2.0, +2.7 and +4.0 degrees.
## A median year, not a promise
All the trajectories are pooled into a median extinction year per glacier, with 25% and 75% probability bounds. The map shows a range, not a single certain date.
## The peak arrives mid-century
The underlying paper, published in Nature Climate Change in 2026, puts peak glacier extinction in the middle of this century. Outlines come from the Randolph Glacier Inventory.

> Peak glacier extinction in the mid-twenty-first century
## Key takeaway

Regional mass-loss numbers hide the real story: thousands of named, local glaciers have a projected year they cease to exist, and warming decides which year.