Back at the Resolute base station, after our successful fifteen days of fieldwork on Ward Hunt Island, I remember asking Éliot and Eva: “Guys, if you had, let’s say, three choices, what would you rate as the most memorable moments we had together up there?” At that time, it was […]

The Summer School started on Monday 17 June, with all participants and organisers meeting at the bus station in Courmayeur (Italy) at 1 pm. Leona and I arrived early, which gave us a chance to grab some focaccia and ice cream and walk around this charming mountain town. After all […]

A vast wall of ice stretching across the horizon and engulfing all the mountains that lay before it: these were my first impressions of the Greenland Ice Sheet. I was no stranger to glaciers having lived for the last few years in the Swiss Alps, but I was taken aback […]

In the summer of 2023, we started our project ArcticAir, characterising microbial communities of the Arctic atmosphere. David and Becky were the sampling team. They flew to Reykjavik (Iceland) and boarded the Commandant Charcot, a tourist ship from the PONANT company, for a month-long cruise through the Northwest Passage. The […]

Hi everyone! I’m Matthias Jaggi, a technical staff member of the Snow Physics group of the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, and I recently spent a second austral summer at the French-Italian research station Dome C in Antarctica. I set up an experiment with the aim of better […]

Our project, ERT-PERM, funded by the Swiss Polar Institute, aimed to install long-term Autonomous Electrical Resistivity Tomography (A-ERT) Monitoring in diverse permafrost regions worldwide. It involved four field trips to different mountain and polar areas, including the Stockhorn mountain in the Swiss Alps, James Ross Island in Antarctica, Yukon in […]

Moulins are near vertical drainage shafts for surface meltwater in ice sheets. On Earth’s large ice sheets, they can be several hundred metres deep. While we assume they are vertical, we now know that moulins can form complex geometries with the ability to store significant amounts of water. As such […]

Glaciers are melting. This is especially true in the Alpine region, which is one of the areas experiencing the fastest rates of ice melting worldwide. As a consequence of global warming, combined with a higher input of water into the outflow system, more organisms are being released into the outflow […]

Going to Antarctica as a renewable energy scientist? Ever since I first visited the Arctic, I dreamed of doing science in Antarctica, but with a study background in renewable energy, I never thought it would be possible. Who would consider using renewable energy in these conditions, right? Well, it turns […]