Mountain glaciers recouple to atmospheric warming over the twenty-first century
Shaw T, Miles ES, McCarthy M, Buri P, Guyennon N, Salerno F, Carturan L, Brock B, Pellicciotti F. 2025. Mountain glaciers recouple to atmospheric warming over the twenty-first century. Nature Climate Change.
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Author
Shaw, ThomasISTA 
;
Miles, Evan S.;
McCarthy, MichaelISTA;
Buri, Pascal;
Guyennon, Nicolas;
Salerno, Franco;
Carturan, Luca;
Brock, Benjamin;
Pellicciotti, FrancescaISTA
;
Miles, Evan S.;
McCarthy, MichaelISTA;
Buri, Pascal;
Guyennon, Nicolas;
Salerno, Franco;
Carturan, Luca;
Brock, Benjamin;
Pellicciotti, FrancescaISTA Corresponding author has ISTA affiliation
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Abstract
Recent studies have argued that air temperatures over many mountain glaciers are decoupled from their surroundings, leading to a local cooling which could slow down melting. Here we use a compilation of on-glacier meteorological observations to assess the extent to which this relationship changes under warming. Statistical modelling of the potential temperature decoupling of the world’s mountain glaciers indicates that currently glacier boundary layers warm ~0.83 °C on average for every degree of ambient temperature rise. Future projections under shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) climate scenarios SSP 2-4.5 and SSP 5-8.5 indicate that decoupling, and thus relative cooling over glaciers, is maximized during the 2020s and 2030s, before widespread glacier retreat acts to recouple above-glacier air temperatures with its surroundings. This nonlinear feedback will lead to an increased sensitivity to warming from midcentury, with glaciers losing their capacity to affect the local climate and cool themselves.
Publishing Year
Date Published
2025-10-10
Journal Title
Nature Climate Change
Publisher
Springer Nature
Acknowledgement
This work was funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions grant 101026058. T.E.S. also acknowledges funding from the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101034413. We acknowledge funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement no. 772751, RAVEN, ‘Rapid mass losses of debris-covered glaciers in High Mountain Asia’ and from the Swiss National Science Foundation (ASCENT Project 189890). L.C. carried out work within the RETURN Extended Partnership and received funding from the European Union Next-Generation EU (National Recovery and Resilience Plan—NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3—D.D. 1243 2/8/2022, PE0000005). We acknowledge the dedicated collection of field data and the kind provision of data from many weather stations around the world (details, references and acknowledgements in Supplementary Table 1). Open access funding provided by Institute of Science and Technology (IST Austria).
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IST-REx-ID
Cite this
Shaw T, Miles ES, McCarthy M, et al. Mountain glaciers recouple to atmospheric warming over the twenty-first century. Nature Climate Change. 2025. doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02449-0
Shaw, T., Miles, E. S., McCarthy, M., Buri, P., Guyennon, N., Salerno, F., … Pellicciotti, F. (2025). Mountain glaciers recouple to atmospheric warming over the twenty-first century. Nature Climate Change. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02449-0
Shaw, Thomas, Evan S. Miles, Michael McCarthy, Pascal Buri, Nicolas Guyennon, Franco Salerno, Luca Carturan, Benjamin Brock, and Francesca Pellicciotti. “Mountain Glaciers Recouple to Atmospheric Warming over the Twenty-First Century.” Nature Climate Change. Springer Nature, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02449-0.
T. Shaw et al., “Mountain glaciers recouple to atmospheric warming over the twenty-first century,” Nature Climate Change. Springer Nature, 2025.
Shaw T, Miles ES, McCarthy M, Buri P, Guyennon N, Salerno F, Carturan L, Brock B, Pellicciotti F. 2025. Mountain glaciers recouple to atmospheric warming over the twenty-first century. Nature Climate Change.
Shaw, Thomas, et al. “Mountain Glaciers Recouple to Atmospheric Warming over the Twenty-First Century.” Nature Climate Change, Springer Nature, 2025, doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02449-0.
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