Losing Mountain Glaciers (Photo : Photo by Marvin Olson from Pixabay) According to a report published in the journal Nature, scientists estimated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers have been losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow each year since 2015. Every year, enough melt flows into the world's growing waters to submerge Switzerland by nearly 24 feet (7.2 meters). From 2015 to 2019, the annual melt rate was 78 billion tons (71 billion metric tons) higher than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, which are separate from the amount of water lost, have doubled in the last 20 years, according to Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France, who led the research.