A difficult 2024 with a minus sign despite last spring's late snowfall. This is the end-of-year balance that is in sight for the Alps and Alpine glaciers, the latter increasingly thinner and almost all of them in sharp retreat throughout the Alps, with impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity. The iconic glacier of this 2024 is the Adamello, the largest glacier in the Italian Alps, which in 2024 will record a loss of thickness in the frontal sector of 3 metres and melt effects up to 3100 metres in altitude. Circular collapses due to the contraction of the glacier mass are expanding. The data taken in September are emblematic: with the front of its tongue completely uncovered, despite the 6 metres of snow measured in late spring on the Pian di Neve Glacier. The Careser Glacier (Ortles-Cevedale Group) is not doing well either, with an average loss of 190 centimetres in thickness, and in South Tyrol the Vedretta Lunga Glacier (Val Martello) and the Vedretta di Ries Glacier (Valle Aurina) with a loss of thickness on their tongues of between one and a half and two metres, to name but a few. Drawing up this balance, on the occasion of International Mountain Day, is Legambiente with data from the fifth Caravan of Glaciers report entitled ‘The effects of the climate crisis on glaciers, the Alpine environment and biodiversity’. Weighing on the precarious state of health of Alpine glaciers is a climate crisis that has accelerated its pace in 2024, with record heat and zero temperatures at high altitudes able to cancel out the benefits of this spring's late snowfalls; but also with 146 extreme weather events, recorded from January to December 2024 in the Alpine arc, that have made the mountains more fragile. Lombardy (49), Veneto (41) and Piedmont (22) were the worst affected regions. In some cases, some weather events even accelerated the melting, as in the case of Saharan dust that arrived with some of the spring disturbances at altitude.