Indonesia's glaciers face extinction by 2026-2027 as El Niño accelerates melt

At the summit of Puncak Jaya, Indonesia's highest mountain, what was once a continuous sheet of ice has become scattered white patches against dark rock. The glaciers that crowned this peak for centuries are nearly gone. Scientists now say they will vanish entirely within the next year or two—by 2026 or 2027 at the latest—making Indonesia the latest nation to lose all its glacial ice to the warming world.

The numbers tell a stark story of collapse. In 1850, ice covered 19.3 square kilometers of Puncak Jaya's summit. By 2022 to 2024, that had shrunk to between 0.16 and 0.23 square kilometers. Of the six glaciers that once existed here, only two remain: Carstensz and East Northwall Firn. The retreat has been relentless, but it has not been steady. During the El Niño event of 2015 to 2016, the rate of ice loss accelerated dramatically. Where glaciers had been thinning at about one meter per year, they suddenly began losing 5.3 meters annually—a fivefold jump in just months. That spike offers a window into what happens when tropical ice meets extreme heat.

Mike Kaplan, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, studies these glaciers and has watched their decline with the certainty of someone watching a predetermined ending unfold. "The fate of these glaciers already seems sealed," he said. The research, published in Cold Regions Science and Technology, points to a convergence of forces: rising global temperatures that push the freezing line higher up the mountain, reducing snowfall at the summit while increasing rain and melt. El Niño amplifies this effect by bringing warmer, drier conditions to the region. Donaldi Permana, a climate researcher who formerly oversaw glacier monitoring for Indonesia's meteorological agency, explained that El Niño "causes less snow in the high zones and more melting, which can be the death sentence for small glaciers." With forecasts suggesting another strong El Niño in the second half of 2026, the timeline for complete disappearance has narrowed to months, not years.

Kaplan emphasized a sobering reality: even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the climate would continue warming for years. "Under current conditions, even with stabilized CO₂ emissions, it is probably already too warm and dry for these glaciers to survive, especially if a strong El Niño occurs," he said. The ice is caught between two forces—the long-term warming already baked into the atmosphere, and the cyclical intensification of El Niño. There is no scenario in which they survive.

But the loss extends beyond atmospheric physics and ice measurements. For the indigenous communities of Papua, Puncak Jaya holds spiritual weight that no scientific paper can fully capture. The mountain's summit is considered sacred ground where ancestors dwell. The glacier itself—called "salju abadi" in the local language, meaning eternal snow—is woven into the spiritual identity of the people who live in its shadow. Wewin Wira Cornelis Wahid, a sustainability graduate from Columbia Climate School, explained that the ice is not merely a geographic feature but "the core of a spiritual identity." Its disappearance will erase something that was supposed to be permanent, that was supposed to endure.

Scientists have begun calling tropical glaciers a "canary in the coal mine" for the planet. Because they are smaller and more sensitive to temperature swings than glaciers at higher latitudes, they disappear first. Their loss is a warning of what comes next for larger ice masses on mountains across the world. The glaciers of Puncak Jaya have already delivered that message. Within months, they will be gone entirely, and Indonesia will join a growing list of nations that once had glaciers and no longer do.