Fieldnotes from Svalbard, Norway. February 2026 “Don’t move! Let’s all be quiet for a moment,” said Knut, our field technician. Everyone sat down, trying to find a somewhat comfortable position in our snowmobile suits somewhere between the towering sea ice ridges surrounding us. We – a group of glaciology students […]

It is not easy to store liquid water in Arctic regions. The cold temperatures require the installation of heaters to prevent it from freezing, permafrost makes burying supply pipelines difficult, and freshwater sources may be scarce. As a result, and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, freshwater is scarce in many settlements above […]

Travelling from Arequipa to the Valle de los Volcanes in southern Peru is an experience in itself. The road passes through flat desert areas, deep canyons and fertile river oases, and finally reaches high-altitude villages. After a nine-hour truck ride, we arrived in Chachas, a small village nestled in the […]

Forel expeditionAugust 2025: Ilulissat to Narsaq Glaciers are fascinating in so many ways. Covering larger or smaller areas of continents, they have been shaping Earth’s surface for most of its history. The landscape was already breathtaking from the plane on the way to Greenland. One glacier after another, with the […]

I travelled to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in October 2025 as part of the PolARTS art–science tandem Fire & (A)Ice, embedded in the scientific OptimIce project on microfossils preserved in snow and ice from around the globe. The original plan had been to go jointly on this trip, but due to a […]

Central Tien Shan, Kyrgyzstan, 6-7 August 2025.  What our local colleague Joki didn’t know, as he steered his Soviet-era pickup truck through the knee-deep river towards our remote campsite, was that we were just dog-tired. As he picked us up, we thought that in two short hours we would be […]

Over the past year, our team has been developing and testing a mobile sensing system designed to monitor alpine ecosystems autonomously. Thanks to the generous support of the Polar Access Fund, we were able to take this technology out of the lab and into the field – collecting real-world data […]

A crucial element in better understanding climate change and its impact on hydrological, biogeochemical and ecosystem dynamics lies in the accurate monitoring of hydrological and biogeochemical processes. However, most available analytical techniques for the measurement of (greenhouse) gases in the environment are either laboratory based or based on instrumentation built […]

I am not a field scientist. I am a roboticist by trade and study, with my work focusing on building new robots and making them robust. So, you can imagine how insane it was that my first fieldwork was in the most isolated place I’ve ever been to: the southern […]