Today, 11 December 2024, the thermometer on the Zulmart Glacier at 4900 metres above sea level read -30°C. Monitoring the meteorological conditions at nine weather stations scattered across the Central Asian Pamirs and Tien Shan from the warmth of my office in Switzerland, I was transported in my dreams to last summer’s fieldwork in the remote Pamir Mountains. An incredible journey.
The sea at 4000 m
Our small convoy of 4WDs left Dushanbe, capital city of Tajikistan, a week ago. After a first stop at Glacier 457 and several days of driving on dusty roads, the Pamir Highway has taken us to the Tajik high plateaus. We are making our way through a barren, wind-swept landscape of alien beauty. The air is thin, the sun aggressive and the water scarce. Some isolated houses scattered across the plateau indicate that even here humans survive amidst the harsh conditions. Their only possessions are a few donkeys and sheep, along which they survive the extreme cold and wind of the Pamir winter. After hours of driving across the barren steppes, a thin blue line appears on the horizon. As we get closer the smell of salt and iodine tickles our nostrils, and the crash of the waves resonates in our ears. Lake Karakul fills the landscape, surrounded by the mighty glacierized peaks of the Pamir Mountains.
Left: Marin Kneib on the shores of Lake Karakul. Right: Karakul village with the Pamir glaciers in the background © 2024 Martina Barandun, Dilara Kim, Marin Kneib, all rights reserved
The most beautiful weather station in the world
What a station! It measures it all, wind, air temperature, relative humidity, incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave radiation, and snow height. It even monitors the turbulent fluxes of the boundary layer with a sophisticated eddy-covariance system. It sits proudly at 4900 m, near the equilibrium line of the Zulmart Glacier, standing firmly on its tripod despite the wind, the radiation, the cold. It is unique, the only station at this altitude for thousands of kilometres, one of the very few multi-year, on-glacier stations on the planet. It waves its shiny solar panels towards the nearby off-glacier camp station, taller but so boring. The destiny of an on-glacier station is so much more exciting and prestigious. Erecting this small structure has required so much effort, wiring it, carrying it up, assembling it. How much sweat, blood, tears, and frozen fingers? But absolutely worth it! Back home, so many scientists, students, postdocs and PhDs long to look at its precious data – a set of numbers that assemble into gracile curves, unveiling the secrets of these extreme environments. It really is the most beautiful station in the world! And this year it has been connected to an AstroNode module – a new device for sending data from remote locations to the warm and cosy offices of local and international cryosphere scientists in a cost- and energy-efficient way. And this station was not the only one. Nine AstroNodes have been installed at various meteorological stations across Central Asia over the past two years. Receiving the invaluable data in real time opens new doors to better understand the immediate response of the cryospheric environment to changing climate conditions in very remote and inaccessible regions.
Left: Zulmart weather station, perched on the glacier at 4900 m. Right: the Zulmart Glacier. © 2024 Martina Barandun, Dilara Kim, Marin Kneib, all rights reserved
Drilling in thin air
It has been a few years since the Tajik Center for Research on Glaciers and the University of Fribourg have started monitoring the Zulmart Glacier annually. Working hand in hand, we have set up an array of PVC stakes that are visited every summer. They measure the melt that occurred over the year, complementing the meteorological measurements at the weather stations and the proglacial discharge measurements at the gauging stations. A glacier is however a fine balance between melt and accumulation, and this year we came with the objective to also quantify the amount of snow that fell at high elevation to estimate the mass turnover of the Zulmart Glacier. This glacier lies in the middle of the so-called Pamir-Karakoram Anomaly, where, in the past decades, glaciers have been shown to be unexpectedly healthy despite the warming climate. These observations have pointed towards high precipitation at high altitude. We started our journey expecting particularly thick firn layers, and therefore prepared the necessary gear to drill our way through possibly tens of metres of snow and firn. You can imagine our startled faces when the drill hit the ice after just over a metre! Another location, similar result… The snow and ice layer were so thin! Was that a sign that these glaciers had also succumbed to warming and started declining, as all the other glaciers around the world? This is a riddle that will require work to be deciphered, and that potentially holds the key to the future evolution of the glaciers and water resources in the region.
Left: Hiking up the Zulmart Glacier towards the drill site. Right: Drilling at 5400 m on the Zulmart Glacier. © 2024 Martina Barandun, Dilara Kim, Marin Kneib, all rights reserved
Martina Barandun is a Senior Researcher and Dilara Kim is a Diploma Assistant at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Marin Kneib is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Glaciology at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. Their field trip took place in summer 2024 with financial support from an SPI Technogrant.