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 […]

Sunday March 8, 2020: Jörg, Guangyu, Michael and I are ready to fly to Ny-Ålesund for our second measurement campaign. We plan to analyse the aerosols from the ambient air in a container and measure microphysical properties of clouds with an instrument attached to a tethered balloon. The first campaign […]

You know those days when nothing goes as you though it would? You have a plan and then life happens and everything gets thrown out of the window, but somehow you make a comeback and it turns out to be a great day? I had one of these days on […]

The dramatic mountains and glaciers of the Himalayas draw visitors from around the world.  ‘Himalaya’ means ‘the abode of snows’, yet many of the region’s visitors may not realize that these glaciers are themselves composed of snow, slowly transformed over time into ice. Although the compaction, metamorphism and densification of […]

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 […]

End of the campaign Last Saturday I packed the W-band Doppler radar (WProf), which has been measuring clouds and snowfall above Princess Elisabeth Antarctica base since early December. All the rest of the equipment was already dismounted in the previous days and stored in the base, so this moment assumes […]