Together with Alfonso Ferrone, PhD student at Environmental Remote Sensing Laboratory LTE, we arrived in Antarctica at Princess Elisabeth Station on Nov 22. We have been since then busy deploying a variety of instruments to monitor clouds and precipitation, with of course many expected and unexpected issues. The SPI Exploratory […]

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 […]

(report from PD Dr. Naki Akçar, Institute of Geological Sciences, University of Bern) Recent ice sheet reconstructions and climate models indicate that the polar temperatures and global mean sea level were slightly higher than today at least two times: during the Last Interglacial (LIG; 130,000 to 115,000 years ago) and […]

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, Royal government of Bhutan. The team was comprised of 15 individuals: 5 NCHM officials and […]

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

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 see to be that loud. It is almost like hearing a thunderstorm. Since Eqip […]

We had never been so far north into the high Arctic before, nor in such a remote place. Villum research station is managed by Jørgen Skafte from the University of Aarhus and it is integrated in the military Station Nord, operated by a crew of five members that enroll voluntarily […]