Glaciers Facts

Ice worms live inside glaciers and are so sensitive to temperature that exposure above 40°F causes their body enzymes to break down rapidly, killing them within minutes.

Under the Matterhorn, a glacier has been quietly moving the Italy-Switzerland border. The Theodul Glacier lost nearly a quarter of its mass in just 37 years. The melting shifted the watershed - and the frontier - further into Italian territory. In 2024, Switzerland approved a plan to redraw roughly 100 meters of their shared border. A melting glacier moved a national border.

Mount St. Helens grew a brand-new glacier inside the crater its 1980 eruption left behind. Snow and rockfall piled up in the shade of the crater walls until the ice began to flow. In 2004 a new lava dome punched through it and cut it in half, but the two arms flowed around the dome and merged again by 2008. Crater Glacier is still creeping across the crater floor today.