On-going glacier retreat will change the ways glaciers erode bedrock and subglacial water carries sediment below the glacier. Changes to sediment discharge from glaciers in mountainous or inhabited regions such as Switzerland can impact the delivery of sediment to ecosystems, lead to the infill of hydropower reservoirs, and potentially cause […]

Changes in climate affect the sliding of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets towards the oceans in several ways. One is that when surface meltwater accesses the bed of a glacier or ice sheet, it changes the speed at which the ice slides over its bed. The coupling between climate […]

For decades, mountain communities have been watching streams run dry as glaciers upstream retreat. Many have been forced to abandon their ancestral land, but some still remain defiant, proactively trying to halt the decline. In a decades-long struggle, local communities have attempted to engineer glaciers – from calving off ice […]

Supported by the SPI, Armin Sigmund joined the Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition organized by the International Polar Foundation (IPF). He spent 19 days at Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA) Station to measure the surface mass balance and associated processes such as snow sublimation (transfer into water vapor) and snow transport by […]

I like being in polar regions to do research, but unfortunately, this time I did not have the opportunity to collect the air samples myself. Instead we relied on the expertise of our Norwegian colleagues, who were dedicated to sampling the apparently-pristine, polar atmosphere for us, so that we could […]

In Icelandic soils, accumulation of soil organic carbon is aided by high soil iron concentrations, which arise from the volcanic origin of Iceland’s soils and high rates of aeolian deposition of poorly-weathered, iron-rich volcanic dust. The aim of this project is to understand the coupled fates of iron and carbon […]

The research vessel “Polarstern” returned from the Arctic on 12 October 2020. Ruzica Dadic was part of the last leg of the MOSAiC expedition. In this logbook entry, she regales us with tales of polar bears, sledges and more. Wellington, New Zealand, 15 July 2020, 4.30 a.m.: Today marks the […]

As part of their PolARTS project, the author Gianna Molinari and the artist and photographer Christoph Oeschger accompanied the early-career researcher Fien de Doncker on her field trip to West Greenland. Sediment cores, seabed topographies, stories, sounds and pictures were collected. Fien De Doncker: The world I experienced around Ilulissat […]

Because she was able to take the place of someone else, post-graduate student Amy Macfarlane impulsively postponed her planned return to civilisation and extended her residence in the Artic by several months. That was how she was able to experience how “her” sheet of ice transformed to water once again. […]

MOSAiC Leg 3 This year, things seem to happen differently. It is true, globally, for all the changes induced by the corona pandemic. And it was also true for our leg 3 of MOSAiC, where moods of nature and covid-19 created confounding effects… Before leaving for the field study in […]