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Glaciers that end in lakes, oceans or ice shelves form just 3.2% of the world’s glaciers, yet from 2000 to 2019 they lost 134 billion tonnes of ice a year, the majority of global glacier ice loss. This comes from a Nature Communications study by scientists from the universities of Birmingham and Leeds, who examined 216,502 glaciers outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. They are generally large, together covering over half of the global glacier area. Yet size is not everything: relative to their size, lake-ending glaciers lost ice about 57% faster than land-ending ones, and after climate, glacier size and elevation were taken into account, they also flowed about 10% faster than those on land. Iceberg calving and melting by lake water may contribute, but Joe Mallalieu says the cause is still unclear. Because many projection models do not yet fully include lake-ending glaciers, the new classification could help improve forecasts of sea-level rise, water supplies and hazards.