44% of Earth’s glaciers in high-relief mountains are covered by rock debris that insulate the ice from atmospheric forcing, reducing ice melt. However, as the debris cover is not homogeneous, space remains that produce differential melting under variable debris thicknesses, creating a surface morphology in the form of strongly incised […]

The Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology received funding from the SPI to perform fieldwork in summer 2019 on Bowdoin Glacier, an outlet glacier of the Greenland icesheet. This glacier is quite special, because despite its high flow velocity (up to 2m/day where the glacier ends in the sea), it […]

What’s in an ice core? That seems like an odd question. But essentially, that is what we are trying to figure out. We use climate records from ice cores all the time to learn about the past climate and its variability and they are amongst the most important contributors to […]

Measuring glacial movements in-situ is a challenging, but necessary task to model glaciers and predict their future evolution. However, installing GPS stations on ice can be dangerous and expensive when not impossible in the presence of large crevasses. In this project, the ETHZ Autonomous Systems Laboratory develops UAVs for dropping […]

Recent ice sheet reconstructions and climate models indicate that the polar temperatures and global mean sea level were slightly higher than today at least twice: during the Last Interglacial (LIG; 130,000 to 115,000 years ago) and the Pliocene. Although a dramatic surface lowering of East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) during […]

On the 12th of August 2018 we reached the North Pole on board of the Swedish I/B Oden as a part of the ArcticOcean2018 expedition, organized by the Swedish Polar research secretariat. After 2 weeks of navigation we were finally able to leave the ship and step on the North […]

The fieldwork in the Bhutan Himalayas, funded by Swiss Polar Institute, was successfully executed in association with the National Centre for Hydrology and Meteorology of Bhutan (NCHM), Cryosphere Service Division (CSD), Ministry of Economic Affairs and Royal government of Bhutan. The team was comprised of 15 individuals: 5 NCHM officials […]

Sampling day 1: “After spending the first week selecting 20 ponds, I am ready for the main work of my field campaign: the sampling of all these ponds. I am collecting filtered water to analyse its carbon content, and filters to analyse which bacteria live in these ponds. Today is […]

After studying the theory of calving glaciers for almost a year, it was very impressive to see a calving glacier in reality. I did not expect the sound of icebergs breaking off and falling into the sea to be that loud. It is almost like hearing a thunderstorm. Since Eqip […]