When Matthias Huss first visited Rhône Glacier in Switzerland 35 years ago, the ice was just a short walk from where his parents would park the car.
When I first stepped onto the ice... there [was] a special feeling of eternity, says Matthias.
Today, it's half an hour from the same parking spot and the scene is very different.
Every time I go back, I remember how it used to be, recalls Matthias, who is now director of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS), how the glacier looked when I was a child.
There are similar stories for many glaciers all over the planet, because these frozen rivers of ice are retreating - fast. In 2024, glaciers outside the giant ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica lost 450 billion tonnes of ice, according to a recent World Meteorological Organization report.
That's equivalent to a block of ice 7km (4.3 miles) tall, 7km wide and 7km deep - enough water to fill 180 million Olympic swimming pools.
Glaciers are melting everywhere in the world, says Prof Ben Marzeion of the Institute of Geography at the University of Bremen. They are sitting in a climate that is very hostile to them now because of global warming.
Switzerland's glaciers have been particularly badly hit, losing a quarter of their ice in the last 10 years, measurements from GLAMOS revealed this week.
It's really difficult to grasp the extent of this melt, explains Dr Huss.
But photos - from space and the ground - tell their own story.
Satellite images show how the Rhône Glacier has changed since 1990, when Dr Huss first visited. At the front of the glacier is a lake where there used to be ice.
Until recently, glaciologists in the Alps used to consider 2% of ice lost in a single year to be extreme. Then 2022 blew that idea out of the water, with nearly 6% of Switzerland's remaining ice lost in a single year.
For many smaller glaciers, like the Pizol Glacier in the north-east Swiss Alps, it's been too much. This is one of the glaciers that I observed, and now it's completely gone, says Dr Huss. It definitely makes me sad.
In south-east Switzerland, the Pers Glacier once fed the larger Morteratsch Glacier, which flows down towards the valley. Now the two no longer meet.
And the largest glacier in the Alps, the Great Aletsch, has receded by about 2.3km (1.4 miles) over the past 75 years. The loss of ice will be particularly acutely felt by mountain communities dependent on glaciers for fresh water.
About 800 million people rely at least partly on meltwater from glaciers in the Asian high mountains, where the climate changes most drastically. This vulnerability underscores the urgent need for action to mitigate climate change.
Half of the ice remaining across the world's mountain glaciers could be preserved if global warming is limited to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Our current trajectory, however, leads towards 2.7C warming, which could result in three-quarters of the ice being lost by century's end.
