Glaciers contain large part of microbial processes and the distribution of bacteria is affected by atmospheric circulations and surrounding environments.In this study, four glaciers of China were investigated: Muztaw glacier (MSD) located in Xinjiang Province, Muztagata glacier (MZ) in the Pamir Plateau, Zhadang (ZD) and Yulong (YL) glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau, among them the atmospheric circulations and concentrations of the main ions in snowpack was different.In order to explore the distribution of bacterial community as well as their relationships with environmental factors, bacterial community based on 16S rRNA gene were assessed using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP).Our results showed that the bacteria diversity was the highest in the snow samples of MSD glacier, but the lowest in MZ glacier.Both the nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis and clustering analysis results indicated that bacterial community composition of four glaciers changed significantly (p < 0.05).Furthermore, the snow bacteria were classified into 12 groups, among which Betaproteobacteria (56.66% ~ 63.37%) and Bacteroidetes (21.48% ~ 34.69%) were the predominant communities, the community composition of snow bacteria varied among the four glaciers, especially on the level of OTUs.In addition, the bacteria were associated to various ecosystems and a large proportion of them (44.04% ~ 63.82%) were closely related to those from cold conditions.These results suggested the bacterial community composition had obvious spatial distribution, which were influenced by differfent atmospheric circulations and environmental factors.