🏔️ Global Glacier Extinction Explorer

The Global Glacier Extinction Explorer is an immersive, interactive mapping tool designed to visualize the projected disappearance of the world's glaciers.

🛠️ Interface & Navigation

Users can manipulate the map using a comprehensive set of controls to customize their viewing experience:

Map Customization

Basemap Options: Toggle place names and administrative boundaries.
Glacier Overlays:
- Enable the primary glacier layer.
- Activate outline-on-hover for precise boundaries.
- Toggle details-on-hover for immediate data summaries.
Perspective: Use the 3D button to tilt the camera and analyze the surrounding topography.

Exploration Workflow

Navigate the global map to locate specific ice bodies.
Select a specific warming scenario to observe how extinction timelines shift.
Hover over a glacier for a snapshot of data.
Click a glacier to open a full profile (including elevation, area, and scenario-based timing).

📖 About the Project

Traditionally, glaciology has focused on ~~regional mass balance and total area loss~~. While useful, these broad metrics overlook the loss of individual glaciers.

Glaciers are more than just contributors to sea-level rise; they possess profound ecological, societal, and cultural significance, often serving as the heartbeat of local communities and landscapes.

In alignment with the UN International Year of Glacier Preservation (2025), this tool pivots the scientific lens toward the fate of specific, individual glaciers.

🔬 Methodology & Criteria

To determine when a glacier is officially "extinct," the study employs two strict thresholds. A glacier is considered gone if:

Area Threshold: The surface area falls below $0.01 \text{ km}^2$ .
Volume Threshold: The remaining ice volume is $< 1\%$ of its original state.

The Modeling Pipeline

The projections are derived from a synthesis of three global models: GloGEM, OGGM, and PyGEM. These are paired with various General Circulation Models across four temperature trajectories:

Scenario	Projected Temp Increase
Low Warming	$+1.5^\circ\text{C}$
Moderate Warming	$+2.0^\circ\text{C}$
High Warming	$+2.7^\circ\text{C}$
Extreme Warming	$+4.0^\circ\text{C}$

Note on Constraints: Extinction is measured against the original Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI v6.0) outlines. The model does not account for fragmentation; any ice remaining within the original boundary is treated as a single entity.

📚 Data & Technical Credits

Data Sources

Extinction Projections: Van Tricht, L., Zekollari, H., Huss, M. (doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02513-9).
Public Dataset: Regional and specific results are hosted on Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.17371641).
Outlines: RGI Consortium (2017), Randolph Glacier Inventory v6 (doi:10.7265/4m1f-gd79).
Ice Volume: Farinotti et al. (Consensus estimate for global ice thickness).

Technical Stack

The application was developed using the following open-source ecosystem:

# Rendering & Streaming
MapLibre GL JS  # Map rendering
PMTiles         # Vector tile streaming
go-pmtiles      # Tile packaging

# Data Processing
GeoPandas       # Spatial data
NumPy           # Numerical analysis
GDAL / ogr2ogr # Tile generation

Development Credits: Created by Van Tricht, with architectural and frontend assistance from Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-6 Astra.

Feedback: For data corrections or naming suggestions, please contact lander.van.tricht@vub.be.