Amid the towering tropical mountains of Papua lies an increasingly rare phenomenon: vast stretches of snow and ice that have survived for thousands of years on Puncak Jaya, the highest mountain in Southeast Asia at 4,884 meters above sea level.
This natural heritage site, which is part of the world’s Seven Summits, is now on the brink of extinction. Over the past 44 years, Puncak Jaya has lost 97 percent of its ice, along with four of its six glaciers. The two remaining glaciers, Carstensz and East Northwall Firn, are not expected to survive beyond 2030.
How Drastic Is the Retreat?
The numbers speak louder than any narrative. In 1850, the ice cover in this region spanned around 19.3 square kilometers, equivalent to roughly 3,500 football fields. Between 2022 and 2024, that figure had shrunk to just 0.16 to 0.23 square kilometers, or only about 40 football fields.
Monitoring conducted by Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) at the end of 2024 recorded a further reduction of 0.11 to 0.16 square kilometers compared to 2022 levels. Donaldi Permana, a climate researcher leading BMKG’s glacier monitoring efforts, warned that several models suggest these glaciers could disappear in the near future.
He also identified the El Niño phenomenon, which is forecast to intensify in the second half of 2026, as a major threat that could accelerate the worst-case scenario.
“The fate of these glaciers may already be sealed,” he said.
If that happens, Indonesia would join Venezuela and Slovenia as countries that have lost all of their glaciers.
The April 2026 edition of Climate Chronicles published by Nature Reviews Earth & Environment also noted that glaciers worldwide lost around 408 gigatons of ice in 2025, making it the sixth-worst year for glacier loss since records began in 1975.
El Niño and Global Warming: The Two Main Drivers
The rapid melting has been intensified by the El Niño cycle. During El Niño events, Papua becomes drier and warmer, meaning less snowfall in 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 extracted in 2010, which contains climate records spanning half a century. The findings showed that the rate of vertical ice thinning surged from around 1.0 meter per year to 5.3 meters during the 2015–2016 El Niño event, nearly a fivefold increase within a short period.
The study was published in the journal Cold Regions Science and Technology.
Quoted by phys.org, Mike Kaplan, a geologist from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia Climate School, explained the mechanism behind the phenomenon: rising temperatures push the freezing level higher, causing precipitation to fall more often as rain rather than snow.
Instead of nourishing the glaciers, the water accelerates melting. Even under optimistic scenarios, Kaplan said that current conditions mean “it is likely too warm and dry for these glaciers to remain, especially if there is a strong El Niño year.”
More Than Just Ice: Cultural and Scientific Losses
The disappearance of glaciers is not only an ecological issue. For Indigenous Papuan communities, the eternal snow of Puncak Jaya is more than a geographical feature; it is a sacred space believed to be the resting place of their ancestors.
Its disappearance represents the erosion of a spiritual identity that has been passed down for generations. Even its local name, “eternal snow,” now feels painfully ironic amid the unstoppable pace of melting.
Glaciers also hold irreplaceable scientific value. Quoted by National Geographic, Marie Šabacká, a biologist from Charles University in the Czech Republic, explained that glaciers preserve atmospheric records dating back as far as 800,000 years in the form of gas bubbles trapped within layers of ice.
“We are losing knowledge that has been hidden inside glaciers for thousands of years,” she said during a public lecture at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Indonesia, in March 2026.
She compared it to the burning of the Library of Alexandria: a historical archive of the planet’s climate disappearing before it can be fully understood.
The Impacts Are Already Being Felt
Beyond Papua, the global impacts of melting ice are already affecting other regions.
Dr. Emilya Nurjani from the Faculty of Geography at Universitas Gadjah Mada explained that melting ice in mountains and polar regions increases sea levels, which in turn worsens coastal erosion and sea-level rise along the northern coast of Java, including Semarang, as cited on UGM’s official website.
As an archipelagic nation, Indonesia stands on the front line of these consequences.
According to Kaplan, tropical glaciers are like a “canary in the coal mine” — an early warning sign for the world’s entire ice system. Their small size makes them more vulnerable and faster to respond to temperature changes compared to glaciers in higher latitudes. And at Puncak Jaya, that warning song is almost over.
