Alpine Club demands better protection: "Glaciers are melting out of measurement program"

Climate change is exacerbating glacial retreat in the Alps. Measuring glaciers is also becoming increasingly challenging for the volunteers of the Austrian Alpine Club.

Every spring, the Austrian Alpine Club takes its team on a journey Glacier report A report on the state of glaciers in Austria reveals a new record low last year: 92 of the 93 glaciers studied retreated during the glacier budget year. The Pasterze, Austria's largest glacier, even by 203,5 meters – according to the Alpine Club, a “warning signal to climate policy”.

With the melting ice and rising temperatures, on-site measurements are becoming more challenging every year. Because access is becoming more difficult and there is a risk of rockfall, the Austrian Alpine Club will soon no longer be able to carry out measurements on some glaciers.

Glacier retreat makes volunteer measurements more difficult.

Behind the Alpine Club's annual glacier measurements is a team of volunteers. Around 50 participants have now completed the measurements for the new glacier report, which will be published in spring 2026. Although the analysis is still underway, the Alpine Club is already warning that many glaciers will no longer be measurable in the future. In some cases, the danger to the measurement teams is too high, and in others, the measurements are hardly worthwhile anymore – "because the glaciers are simply disappearing."

One of the volunteer glacier surveyors is the geographer Michael Krobath from the Styrian Environmental Education Center. Since the early 1990s, he has been measuring the length changes of three small glaciers in the Schober Group in Carinthia for the Alpine Club. He uses a method that has proven successful for over 100 years: measuring the length from several fixed points per glacier. Now he fears that this will soon no longer be possible on "his" glaciers.

Because: Two of the three glaciers he measures annually are in danger of calving away at mid-height in the coming years – the Hornkees and the Wandnischengletscher on the Roter Knopf. This would mean that the current measuring points would be located significantly higher up in the terrain, where the increasing risk of rockfall makes measurements too dangerous. The situation is even more dramatic at the Gössnitzkees: The glacier is so small, fragmented, and covered in debris that measurements there are unlikely to be worthwhile in the foreseeable future. This includes drones, which the Austrian Alpine Club now uses on some glaciers.

The Alpine Club demands "unconditional glacier protection"

In light of the alarming findings, the Alpine Club is calling for the unconditional protection of glaciers through concrete political action. Geographer Michael Krobath also hopes that politicians will "understand glacier protection measures as part of a comprehensive environmental and nature conservation strategy."

The Austrian Alpine Club has been calling for better protection for glacier areas for years, as well as for their fragile glacial forelands – areas that only became ice-free in the last 175 years or so. The sensitive ecosystems that have developed there should be preserved despite increasing pressure from human activity, in order to maintain high biodiversity and geodiversity.

This year was also marked by several global political events focused on glacier death: The United Nations declared 2025 the International Year for the Conservation of Glaciers, and March 21st was declared "World Glacier Day". An international team of researchers recently presented a study, according to which The ice loss has been accelerating ever since the turn of the millennium. Of the world's 275.000 glaciers, those in the Alps and the Pyrenees are the most affected.

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Cover photo credit: Michael Krobath