It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, December 15, 2025
Air conditioning in nursing homes and mortality during extreme heat
JAMA Internal Medicine
About The Study:
In this case-crossover study, mortality was lower during extreme heat days in nursing homes with air conditioning (AC) compared to those without AC. These findings suggest that AC provision in nursing homes and other congregate care settings may be important for preventing mortality among older adults during extreme heat days.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Nathan M. Stall, MD, PhD, email nathan.stall@sinaihealth.ca.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
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Hidden within the Morteratsch Glacier in Switzerland lies a large ice cave — a striking yet sobering sign of the ongoing and accelerating glacier disintegration leading to a reduction in the number of glaciers in the Alps and worldwide.
Credit: Lander Van Tricht / ETH Zurich, Chair of Glaciology
In brief:
In a groundbreaking study, an international team led by ETH Zurich researchers has for the first time calculated how many glaciers worldwide are likely to remain until the end of the century and for how long.
Depending on how sharply the planet warms, the study shows that in a scenario with a global temperature rise of +4.0 °C, only about 18,000 glaciers would remain, whereas at +1.5 °C there would be around 100,000.
The researchers coined the term, “Peak Glacier Extinction”, the point when annual glacier loss hits its maximum. At +1.5 °C it occurs around 2041 with 2,000 glaciers lost; at +4 °C it shifts to 2055 and rises to 4,000.
Glaciers are melting worldwide. In some regions, they could even disappear completely. Looking at the number of glaciers disappearing, the Alps could reach their peak loss rate as early as 2033 to 2041. Depending on how sharply the planet warms, this period may mark a time when more glaciers vanish than ever before. Worldwide, the peak glacier loss rate will occur about ten years later and could rise from 2,000 to 4,000 glaciers lost each year.
For the Alps, the outlook is stark: If current climate policies steer the world towards a temperature rise of +2.7 °C, only about 110 glaciers would remain in Central Europe by 2100 – a mere 3 per cent of today’s total. At +4 °C, that number would plunge to around 20. Even medium-sized glaciers such as the Rhône Glacier would shrink to tiny remnants of ice or disappear completely. In this scenario, the mighty Aletsch Glacier would fragment into several smaller parts. This continues a trend that ETH Zurich researchers have already traced in the past – and it shows no sign of slowing: only recently, they revealed that between 1973 and 2016, more than 1,000 glaciers vanished in Switzerland alone (cf. Annals of Glaciology).
More than half of small glaciers lost
An international team of researchers led by ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has drawn this and further conclusions in a groundbreaking study that, for the first time, calculates how many glaciers worldwide disappear each year, are likely to remain until the end of the century, and for how long. “For the first time, we’ve put years on when every single glacier on Earth will disappear,” says Lander Van Tricht, lead author of the study published on 15 December 2025 in Nature Climate Change.
Unlike previous research, which mainly focused on global ice mass and surface area loss, the ETH Zurich-led team shifts the spotlight to the number of disappearing glaciers, their regions, and the timeline of their disappearance. Their findings reveal that regions with many small glaciers at lower elevations or near the equator are particularly vulnerable – including the Alps, the Caucasus, the Rocky Mountains, as well as parts of the Andes and African mountain ranges that lie in low latitudes.
“In these regions, more than half of all glaciers are expected to vanish within the next ten to twenty years,” says Van Tricht, a researcher at ETH Zurich’s Chair of Glaciology and the WSL.
How many glaciers in the Alps – and worldwide – will survive?
The pace of glacier retreat depends on the extent of global warming. For this reason, the researchers ran projections using three state-of-the-art global glacier models and several climate scenarios. For the Alps, they found that with a +1.5 °C rise, 12 per cent of glaciers would remain by 2100 (roughly 430 out of about 3,000 in 2025); at +2.0 °C, around 8 per cent or ca. 270 glaciers would survive – and at +4 °C, just 1 per cent, or 20 glaciers.
For comparison: In the Rocky Mountains, around 4,400 glaciers would endure under the 1.5 °C scenario – about 25 per cent of today’s roughly 18,000 glaciers. At +4 °C, only about 101 would remain, a 99 per cent loss. In the Andes and Central Asia, about 43 per cent would survive at 1.5 °C. But at +4 °C, the numbers plummet: in the Andes, only around 950 glaciers would remain, a 94 per cent loss; in Central Asia, roughly 2,500 glaciers – a 96 percent decline. Overall, it can be said that in a scenario with a global temperature rise of +4.0 °C only about 18,000 glaciers would remain, whereas at +1.5°C there would be around 100,000.
The study also shows that there is no region left where glaciers’ numbers are not declining. Even in the Karakoram of Central Asia, where some glaciers temporarily grew after the turn of the millennium, glaciers are projected to disappear.
Every degree of warming matters — or twice as many glaciers will die
In their study, the ETH Zurich researchers introduce the term “Peak Glacier Extinction”, which marks the point or zenith when the number of glaciers disappearing within a single year reaches its maximum. After that, the annual loss rates decline – simply because most of the smaller glaciers have already disappeared. From a climate policy perspective, this matters: the shrinking of glaciers continues even as the number of disappearing glaciers will decline after the peak.
The team calculated this peak for different warming scenarios. Under a +1.5 °C rise in global warming, as envisaged by the Paris Agreement, it would occur around 2041, when roughly 2,000 glaciers vanish in just one year. At +4 °C, the peak shifts to about 2055 – but climbs to around 4,000 glaciers. That the peak comes later under stronger warming may seem paradoxical. The reason: in warmer conditions, not only do small glaciers melt completely, but larger glaciers vanish as well. Capturing this total loss of even the biggest glaciers is a key strength of the new approach.
The ETH Zurich researchers show that at +4 °C, twice as many glaciers disappear at the peak as under +1.5 °C. While about half of today’s glaciers survive in the 1.5-degree scenario, only one-fifth remain at +2.7 °C – and just one-tenth at +4 °C. Every tenth of a degree counts in slowing the decline. “The results underline how urgently ambitious climate action is needed,” says Daniel Farinotti, co-author and ETH Zurich Professor of Glaciology.
What does glacier retreat mean for politics, culture and economies?
How does glacier retreat affect people and culture? The new perspective promises fresh insights for politics, business, and culture. Previous studies focused on measuring glacier loss by mass and volume, which allowed projections for sea-level rise and water resource management. “The melting of a small glacier hardly contributes to rising seas. But when a glacier disappears completely, it can severely impact tourism in a valley,” says Lander Van Tricht.
The new study not only reveals when and where glaciers will vanish; it can also help policymakers, communities, tourism sector and natural hazard managers prepare for a future with less ice and water.
Against this backdrop, ETH Zurich researchers are also involved in initiatives such as the Global Glacier Casualty List, which aims to preserve the names and stories of lost glaciers – contributing, among others, the stories of the Birch and Pizol glaciers. “Every glacier is tied to a place, a story and people who feel its loss,” says Van Tricht. “That’s why we work both to protect the glaciers that remain and to keep alive the memory of those that are gone.”
Hidden within the Morteratsch Glacier in Switzerland lies a large ice cave — a striking yet sobering sign of the ongoing and accelerating glacier disintegration leading to a reduction in the number of glaciers in the Alps and worldwide.
Credit
Lander Van Tricht / ETH Zurich, Chair of Glaciology
Lower-lying mountain regions in Central Europe, western Canada, the United States, Central Asia, and the equator-near parts of the Andes and African ranges could lose more than half of their glaciers before 2040. The graphic shows clockwise: the darker the shading, the earlier the loss.
Credit
Graphic: Basemap / Natural Earth / Springer Nature / ETH Zurich, Chair of Glaciology
Pizol Glacier, Switzerland (2006)
Small glaciers in the Alps are disappearing completely – as already happened with the Pizol Glacier – and this is becoming increasingly common.
Credit
Images: Matthias Huss / ETH Zurich, Chair of Glaciology
Pizol Glacier, Switzerland (2025)
Small glaciers in the Alps are disappearing completely – as already happened with the Pizol Glacier – and this is becoming increasingly common.
Credit
Images: Matthias Huss / ETH Zurich, Chair of Glaciology
Rhône Glacier (2022)
Under extreme warming, even medium-sized glaciers such as the Rhône Glacier shrink dramatically. By 2100, depending on the global warming scenario, only 20 glaciers could remain in the Alps.
Credit
(Image: ETH Zurich / Chair of Glaciology
Rhône Glacier (2025)
Under extreme warming, even medium-sized glaciers such as the Rhône Glacier shrink dramatically. By 2100, depending on the global warming scenario, only 20 glaciers could remain in the Alps.
Peak Glacier Extinction in the mid-twenty-first century
Article Publication Date
15-Dec-2025
COI Statement
Financial support from the Research Foundation—Flanders through an Odysseus Type II project (grant no. G0DCA23N; ‘GlaciersMD’ project). H.Z. and R.A. were also funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon Framework research and innovation programme of the European Union (grant no. 101115565; ‘ICE3’ project). Additionally, H.Z., M.H. and D.F. were supported by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Union (PROTECT project; grant no. 869304). D.R.R. received support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grant nos 80NSSC20K1296 and 80NSSC20K1595), and D.R.R. and B.T. received support from the National Park Service (grant no. P22AC02208). L.S. is the recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (no. 25928). L.S., P.S. and F.M. received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101003687). P.S. and F.M. received funding from the Austrian Climate Research Programme—14th call, under grant agreement no. KR21KB0K00001 (HyMELT-CC), and from ESA’s ‘Digital Twin Component for Glaciers’ project (grant no. 4000146160/24/I-KE).
New phenotyping platform identifies key drought-tolerance genes in soybean
Nanjing Agricultural University The Academy of Science
Using the device, the team analyzed 224 soybean recombinant inbred lines and extracted five traits related to slow wilting, identifying stress recognition time point (SRTP) and decrease in transpiration under stress (DTrs) as the most informative indicators. The approach uncovered a novel major QTL, qDTrs_Gm04, linked to drought resilience and pinpointed GmWRKY58 as a promising candidate gene.
Slow wilting—the ability of plants to maintain turgor and rigidity during drought—is a critical trait for climate-resilient agriculture. However, traditional transpiration assays rely on labor-intensive visual scoring or expensive physiological instruments, limiting studies to small populations and generating low-resolution data. Slow wilting results from multiple interacting processes, including stomatal conductance, water-use efficiency, osmotic regulation molecules, and leaf morphology. Current phenotyping methods often capture only final symptoms rather than the underlying dynamics, which leads to low QTL detection power and missed genetic targets. These challenges highlight the need for an affordable, automated system capable of continuous time-series measurement across large breeding populations.
The researchers first developed an automated phenotyping platform using low-cost load-cell weighing devices (about $5 each) controlled by microcontrollers to record pot weight every hour and thus estimate transpiration rates. They validated the system on 60 devices in a greenhouse using calibration weights (0, 200, 500, 1000 g) over 48 h, and linear regression yielded a slope of 1.00 and R² = 0.997, confirming high accuracy and consistency. To link transpiration dynamics with slow wilting, they calculated a slow-wilting index from wilting score and leaf moisture content, ranked 224 recombinant inbred lines, and selected 30 slowest- and 30 fastest-wilting lines as divergent groups. Weight logs under drought were denoised using LOWESS regression, revealing a characteristic stair-step pattern of daytime weight loss and nighttime stability that shifted to a plateau when plants perceived stress. From these curves, they extracted five traits: baseline transpiration (Trb), stress recognition time point (SRTP), stress-induced transpiration (Trs), decrease under stress (DTrs), and cumulative transpiration to SRTP (CTaSRTP). Applying these methods, the slow-wilting group showed significantly longer SRTP (157.2 vs 125.0 h) and much lower DTrs (47% vs 72%), indicating delayed stress perception and stronger reduction of transpiration. Correlation analysis across all lines identified SRTP and DTrs as the best physiological indicators of slow wilting, a conclusion reinforced by PCA, where they were the major contributors to the first principal component separating divergent groups. Machine-learning models (Random Forest, XGBoost) further highlighted SRTP, Trs, and DTrs as key predictors of slow-wilting traits. QTL mapping using SRTP and DTrs re-detected the known slow-wilting locus qSW_Gm10 with much higher explained variance and uncovered a novel major QTL, qDTrs_Gm04, from which GmWRKY58 emerged as a strong drought-related candidate gene based on expression, promoter variation, and regulatory network analyses.
This low-cost platform enables continuous, non-destructive, high-density phenotyping, providing a practical solution for large-scale drought-tolerance breeding. By generating time-series physiological data, breeders can identify elite lines earlier, reduce field-testing cost, and accelerate introgression of valuable alleles. The discovery of qDTrs_Gm04 and candidate gene GmWRKY58 offers new molecular targets for improving stomatal control and water-use efficiency, with direct applications in soybean improvement and potential adaptability across crops such as maize, wheat, and pulses.
This work was carried out with the support of "Cooperative Research Program for Agriculture Science and Technology Development (Project No. RS-2025-00853272)" Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea. This work was also supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. RS-2025-25431972).
Plant Phenomics is dedicated to publishing novel research that will advance all aspects of plant phenotyping from the cell to the plant population levels using innovative combinations of sensor systems and data analytics. Plant Phenomics aims also to connect phenomics to other science domains, such as genomics, genetics, physiology, molecular biology, bioinformatics, statistics, mathematics, and computer sciences. Plant Phenomics should thus contribute to advance plant sciences and agriculture/forestry/horticulture by addressing key scientific challenges in the area of plant phenomics.
