Tomorrow is a day I have been looking forward to for a while: Raphi and I will going to the Gornergletscher to conduct a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey with our AIRETH system. AIRETH is a helicopter-borne GPR platform that we re-designed in the frame of an SPI Technogrant funded by […]

The flight into Greenland leaves a strong impression. Everyone in the small red plane is leaning towards the windows to stare at the expanse of white below. For a moment you think it must be clouds stretching to the horizon, but then you see the small details, a mountain peak, […]

The ALANA project, based at the University of Bern’s Humanities in Arctic Research platform focuses on uncovering prehistoric human-environment interactions in Alaska’s Brooks Range mountains. It is supported by the Swiss Polar Institute’s Polar Access Fund and its main local archaeological partners are the University of Alaska Fairbanks UAF and […]

Wide open skies, colourful flowers, and stillness all represent the Arctic tundra to me, but the tundra can also be harsh and unforgiving. Difficult logistics, the cold, and mosquitoes are just a few factors that can make botanical fieldwork a real challenge in the North, not to mention the tiny […]

Exploring the lakes of Southern Greenland has been the most professionally joyful time of my career as an evolutionary ecologist. Yearly trips over the past 6 years (with the exception of 2020!) have been a continual source of scientific inspiration. In 2024, the Swiss Polar Institute (SPI) funded an Exploratory […]

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 […]