"They've been retreating for thousands of years now. One would think that the process would accelerate as they got smaller."

Glaciers can be quite massive. It common to show a picture of retreating glacier, which fools the public into thinking a large part of glacier has retreated- when in fact only a tiny portion of glacier has retreated.

There are vast area on earth with glaciers- and that doesn't need to include such areas as the Antarctic and Greenland.

The Antarctic is mostly glaciers- and it's bigger land area of the US. The Antarctic has highest average elevation of any continent- and this is solely due the glaciers which stacked miles high [2 1/2 miles I believe is about the thickest it gets]. Greenland is smaller but also has ice miles thick.

But there 100,000's sq miles of glaciers not in arctic regions.
Example:

"The tongue of the Malaspina Glacier, the largest glacier in Alaska, fills most of this image. The Malaspina lies west of Yakutat Bay and covers 1,500 square miles (3,880 square kilometers)."
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_553.html