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Matthias Huss of the glacier monitoring group GLAMOS offered a glimpse of the Rhone Glacier, which feeds the eponymous river that flows through Switzerland and France to the Mediterranean, to The Associated Press last month as he trekked up to the icy expanse for a first "maintenance mission" of the summer to monitor its health.

The state of Switzerland's glaciers came into stark and dramatic view of the international community in May when a mudslide from an Alpine mountain . The Birch Glacier on the mountain, which held back a mass of rock near the peak, gave way — sending an avalanche into the valley village below.

Experts say geological shifts and, to a lesser extent global warming, played a role.

Fortunately, the village largely was evacuated beforehand, but Swiss authorities said a 64-year-old man was missing after the incident. On June 24, regional Valais police said they found and were examining human remains of a person who died in the mudslide.

The Alps and Switzerland — home to the most glaciers in any European country by far — saw them retreat for about 170 years, but with ups and downs over time until the 1980s, Huss said. Since then, the decline has been steady, with 2022 and 2023 the worst of all. Last year was a "bit better," he said.

"Now, this year also doesn't look good, so we see we have a clear acceleration trend in the melting of glaciers," said Huss, who also is a lecturer at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETHZ, said in beaming sunshine and with slushy ice dripping underfoot.

Less snow and more heat create punishing conditions

The European Union's Copernicus climate center said May was the worldwide, though temperatures in Europe were below the running average for that month .

Europe is not alone. In a new , the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization said reduced winter snowfall and extreme summer heat last year "were punishing for glaciers" — with 23 out of 24 glaciers in the central Himalayas and the Tian Shan range suffering "mass loss."

The planet is already running up against the  in global temperatures set in the Paris Climate Accord of 2015.

A healthy glacier is considered "dynamic," by generating new ice as snow falls on it at higher elevations while melting at lower altitudes: The losses in mass at lower levels are compensated by gains above.

As a warming climate pushes up the melting to higher altitudes, such flows will slow down or even stop and the glacier will essentially become "an ice patch that is just lying there," Huss said.

"This is a situation we are seeing more and more often on our glaciers: That the ice is just not dynamic anymore," he said. "It's just resting there and melting down in place."

This lack of dynamic regeneration is the most likely process behind the emergence and persistence of holes, seemingly caused by water turbulence at the bottom of the glacier or air flows through the gaps that appear inside the ice, Huss said.

"First the holes appear in the middle, and then they grow and grow, and suddenly the roof of these holes is starting to collapse," he said. "Then these holes get visible from the surface. These holes weren't known so well a few years ago, but now we are seeing them more often."

Such an affected glacier, he said, "is a Swiss cheese that is getting more holes everywhere, and these holes are collapsing — and it's not good for the glacier."

Effects felt from fisheries to borders

Richard Alley, a geosciences professor and glaciologist at Penn State University, noted that glacier shrinkage has wide effects on agriculture, fisheries, drinking water levels and border tensions when it comes to cross-boundary rivers.

"Biggest worries with mountain glaciers may be water issues — now, the shrinking glaciers are supporting summertime (often the dry season) flows that are anomalously higher than normal, but this will be replaced as glaciers disappear with anomalously low flows," he said.

Switzerland gets most of its electricity through hydroelectric plants driven by its lakes and rivers, and wide-scale glacier melt could jeopardize that.

With a spiral drill, Huss sends ice chips flying as he bores a hole into the glacier. Then he and an assistant unfurl a jointed metal pole and click it together to drive it deep down. This serves as a measuring stick for glacier depth.

"We have a network of stakes that are drilled into the ice where we determine the melting of the mass loss of the glacier from year to year," he said. "When the glacier will be melting, which is at the moment a speed of about 5 to 10 centimeters (2-4 inches) a day, this pole will re-emerge."

Reaching up over his head — about 8 feet — he points out the height of a stake that was placed in September, suggesting an ice mass shrunk by that much. Nearly 33 feet of vertical ice were lost in the super-hot year of 2022, he said.