97% Of Tropical Oceania's Glaciers Gone Since 1980; Filmmakers Documenting Their Final Days
An expedition to document the end days of the last tropical glaciers in Oceania has revealed sombre footage of “planetary destruction on fast-forward”.
The once-mighty ice sheets on Puncak Jaya, a mountain surrounded by dense rainforests in West Papua, Indonesia, have survived beyond projections they would disappear by 2026 but have shrunk to a fraction of their original size.
The most significant of the two remaining glaciers, which are known locally as “eternal snow” and referred to in English as the “eternity glaciers”, has lost 95% of its area since 2002, the expedition found. “The ice will be gone: it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” said Klaus Thymann, a Danish explorer and the founder of Project Pressure, an environmental charity. “And ‘when’ is coming very, very soon.”
Tropical glaciers are mostly found in the Andes, but also exist in East Africa and Indonesia. They are rapidly losing mass as fossil fuel pollution heats the planet and melts the ice. Thymann said “it might be weird to have an emotional reaction to an inanimate object” but documenting the loss of the eternity glaciers had left him tearful as he returned to camp after filming on a rare morning of clear skies.
“On a philosophical level, you take eternity – something that’s an abstract, human construct – and we are even now killing our own constructs,” he said. “It raises some very interesting questions, I think, around the little speck we are in geological time, and what amount of chaos we’ve managed to do in such little time.”
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Papua’s tropical glaciers lost 97% of their ice mass between 1980 and 2024, Indonesian researchers found in a study published last month. Four of its six glaciers have completely disappeared, and they project the final two will be gone by the end of the decade. “It is deeply saddening,” said Francine Hematang, a researcher at Papua University’s forestry faculty and the lead author of the study. “This is the only tropical glacier in Indonesia and south-east Asia, and it continues to shrink at an alarming rate.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/27/witnessing-the-disappearance-of-indonesia-eternity-glaciers