Among the high tropical mountains of Papua lies an increasingly rare phenomenon: vast expanses of snow and ice which have survived for 1000’s of years on Puncak Jaya, the best mountain in Southeast Asia at 4,884 meters above sea level.
This natural heritage site, a part of the Seven Summits of the world, is now on the verge of extinction. Over the past 44 years, Puncak Jaya has lost 97 percent of its ice, together with 4 of its six glaciers. The two remaining glaciers, Carstensz and East Northwall Firn, should not expected to survive beyond 2030.
How drastic is the retreat?
The numbers speak louder than any narrative. In 1850, the ice cover on this region covered roughly 19.3 km2, which is the equivalent of roughly 3,500 football fields. In the years 2022–2024, this number shrank to only 0.16–0.23 km2, or only about 40 football fields.
Monitoring by the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) in late 2024 showed an extra reduction of 0.11-0.16 km2 in comparison with 2022 levels. Donaldi Permana, a climate scientist leading BMKG’s glacier monitoring efforts, warned that several models suggested these glaciers could disappear within the near future.
He also recognized the El Niño phenomenon, which is forecast to accentuate within the second half of 2026, because the primary threat that might speed up the worst-case scenario.
“The fate of those glaciers may already be decided,” he said.
If this happens, Indonesia will join Venezuela and Slovenia as countries which have lost all of their glaciers.
April 2026 issue Climate Chronicles posted by Nature Reviews Earth and Environment also noted that glaciers world wide have lost about 408 gigatons of ice in 2025, making it the sixth worst 12 months of glacier loss since records began in 1975.
El Niño and global warming: the 2 primary drivers
The rapid melting was intensified by the El Niño cycle. During El Niño, Papua becomes drier and warmer, which suggests less snowfall within the highlands and increased ice melt. Together, these conditions create a deadly combination, especially for small glaciers.
Permana and his team analyzed a 32-meter ice core excavated in 2010, which incorporates half a century of climate data. The findings showed that the speed of vertical ice thinning increased from about 1.0 meters per 12 months to five.3 meters through the 2015–2016 El Niño event, an almost fivefold increase within the short period.
The study was published within the journal Science and technology of cold regions.
Quoted by physi.orgMike Kaplan, a geologist at Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, explained the mechanism behind the phenomenon: Rising temperatures raise freezing levels, causing precipitation to occur more often as rain than snow.
Instead of nourishing glaciers, water accelerates melting. Even under optimistic scenarios, Kaplan said current conditions mean it’s “probably too warm and dry for glaciers to stay, especially if there may be a robust El Niño 12 months.”
More than simply ice: cultural and scientific losses
The disappearance of glaciers shouldn’t be only an ecological problem. For indigenous Papuan communities, the everlasting snow of Puncak Jaya is greater than only a geographical feature; it’s a sacred space considered the resting place of their ancestors.
Its disappearance marks the erosion of the spiritual identity passed down from generation to generation. Even its local name “everlasting snow” now seems painfully ironic within the face of the unstoppable rate of melting.
Glaciers even have irreplaceable scientific value. Quoted by National GeographerMarie Šabacká, a biologist at Charles University within the Czech Republic, explained that the glaciers preserved atmospheric records dating back 800,000 years in the shape of gas bubbles trapped within the ice layers.
“We are losing knowledge that has been hidden in glaciers for thousands of years,” she said during a public lecture on the Faculty of Mathematics and Science of Universitas Indonesia in March 2026.
She compared it to the burning of the Library of Alexandria: a historical archive during which a planet’s climate disappears before it could possibly be fully understood.
The effects are already being felt
Beyond Papua, the worldwide effects of melting ice are already affecting other regions.
Dr. Emilya Nurjani from the Department of Geography, Universitas Gadjah Mada, explained that melting ice within the mountains and polar regions is raising sea levels, which in turn worsens coastal erosion and sea level rise along the northern coast of Java, including Semarang, as reported on the official UGM website.
As an archipelagic country, Indonesia is on the front line of those consequences.
According to Kaplan, tropical glaciers are like “the canary within the coal mine” – an early warning signal for your entire world’s ice system. Their small size makes them more sensitive and respond more quickly to temperature changes in comparison with glaciers at higher latitudes. And in Puncak Jaya, this warning song is sort of over.
