Three Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water are lost every second from Earth's glaciers.

In recent years, scientists have repeatedly warned about the looming climate crisis facing our planet: the world has already experienced unprecedented heatwaves and droughts, and we are set to witness a significant loss of sea ice, which will lead to rising global sea levels, according to Live Science.

A groundbreaking new study offers the first comprehensive global picture of glacier shrinkage over the past 25 years. The findings indicate that glaciers worldwide have already lost a staggering 5% of their volume since the year 2000.

The research was conducted by the French National Center for Scientific Research and a number of other research institutions, revealing that Earth's glaciers have been losing an average of 300 billion tons of ice each year from 2000 to 2023 — this translates to a 5% reduction in sea ice volume since the beginning of the millennium. For comparison, this is equivalent to the amount of ice that melts or calves from glaciers every second, roughly the volume of three Olympic swimming pools.

According to the lead author of the study, a professor from the University of Zurich and director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, Michael Zemp, such a remarkable reduction is a result of global warming driven by our sharply increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists note that while they expected to find glaciers melting, the volume of ice lost in recent years has shocked even experts. The results revealed extreme glacier losses in the Alps and Pyrenees of Europe, with both regions experiencing a 40% reduction in glacier volume over the study period. For instance, in the European Alps, glaciers lost 10% of their ice in just two years.

During the study, researchers examined satellite data and direct measurements from each glacial region in the world, excluding the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica — fortunately, these are so large that they have a delayed response to warming. Scientists collected and transformed hundreds of glacier-related datasets into time series, which could then be analyzed to paint a global picture of how glaciers have changed over time.

The researchers' findings revealed stark regional differences in ice loss throughout the study period. The authors of the study note that glaciers in the Alps and Pyrenees experienced the greatest reductions relative to their size, while glaciers on sub-Antarctic islands lost only about 2% of their ice.

Scientists also discovered a 36% increase in annual ice loss between the first half of the study period, from 2000 to 2011, and the second half, from 2012 to 2023, indicating that ice loss is accelerating.

The data suggests that, excluding the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers worldwide contained approximately 134,182 billion tons of ice in the year 2000. Unfortunately, by 2023, this figure had decreased to about 126,971 billion tons. Experts also note that the volume of lost ice has contributed to a rise in global sea levels by 18 millimeters.

According to another co-author of the study, Ines Dussaiyan Lehmann, a researcher and glaciologist at the University of Zurich, rising sea levels are not the only risk associated with glacier melting. Glaciers are vital sources of freshwater, particularly for local communities in Central Asia and the Central Andes, and the reduction in their volume could jeopardize the region's water security.