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 […]

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 […]