Climate change has dramatically altered the Swiss Alp landscape — at a quicker pace than expected — as melting glaciers have created more than 1,000 new lakes across the mountains, a study published on Monday showed.

The inventory of Swiss Glacial lakes showed that almost 1,200 new lakes have formed in formerly glaciated regions of the Swiss Alps since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850.

Around 1,000 of them still exist today, according to the study published by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).

That is far more than the few hundreds the researchers had expected to find at the beginning of the project.

“We were surprised by the sheer numbers,” Daniel Odermatt, head of the Eawag Remote Sensing Group that carried out the study, said in a statement.

He said the “marked acceleration in formation” was also surprising, pointing out that “180 have been added in the last decade alone”.

Glaciers in the Swiss Alps are in steady decline, losing a full 2% of their volume last year alone, according to an annual study by the Swiss Academies of Science.

And even if the world were to fully implement the 2015 Paris Agreement two-thirds of the Alpine glaciers will likely be lost, according to a 2019 study by the ETH technical university.

Our code of editorial values