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Around 95 per cent of glaciers in the Alps will be wiped out by the end of the century if the world continues pumping out carbon emissions at the current rate.

That is the stark warning from research using a more realistic way of modelling how ice will react to rising temperatures due to climate change.

Such a dramatic change would pose natural hazards such as flooding, a huge reduction in hydropower output and be a blow for the region鈥檚 tourism industry, say the Swiss team behind the work.

鈥淵ou get what you can鈥檛 really call glaciers any more, just some ice patches,鈥� says Harry Zekollari of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who聽presented the research at聽the European Geosciences Union Conference in Vienna, Austria, this week.

Today, there are around 3500 glaciers in the Alps, containing about 100 cubic kilometres of water. Some of those glaciers lie below the snow that thousands of people ski and snowboard across each year.

The extent to which this ice will be lost hinges on how much carbon humanity emits from cars, power stations and industry in the coming years.

Governments鈥� carbon-cutting plans under the Paris climate deal by 2100, which would cause a 94.5 per cent decline in the Alps鈥� glacier mass.

But if tougher action limits temperature rises to no more than 1.7掳C, about 37 per cent of the ice will remain by 2100.

鈥淚 think there is still hope. We see the emissions decide if there are some glaciers or not,鈥� says Zekollari.

But whatever action countries take on climate change, the Alps are already doomed to lose about half of their glaciers鈥� ice by 2050.

This is partly because of their slow motion response to rising temperatures, which means a certain amount of melting is already locked in by historical emissions. The聽other reason is that the different paths the world might take on emissions, as outlined by the UN climate science panel, stay relatively close to one another in the next two decades, but take very different trajectories later in the century.

The conclusions of the new study are broadly in line with previous modelling efforts. What is new about Zekollari鈥檚 approach is that it takes into account the physics of how ice in the glaciers will move, something previous work has not.

This focus on ice dynamics could be even more important when looking at other glaciers around the world. The glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas are much bigger than those of the Alps, and ice dynamics are even more vital in predicting losses in larger glaciers, Zekollari says.