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 […]
Read MoreFieldnotes
Impressions, anecdotes and experiences from the field. Authors are beneficiaries of SPI funding. The posts present the authors’ reflections of their field experiences.
Peeking inside a Himalayan glacier – Evan Miles
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 […]
Read MoreGreenland Fieldwork 2019 – Eef van Dongen
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 […]
Read MoreNews from Princess Elisabeth Station in Antarctica II – Alfonso Ferrone
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 […]
Read MoreNews from the Princess Elisabeth Station in Antarctica I – Alexis Berne
Together with Alfonso Ferrone, PhD student at Environmental Remote Sensing Laboratory LTE, we arrived in Antarctica at Princess Elisabeth Station on 22 November. 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 […]
Read MoreTurbulent times on the Arctic ice – David Wagner reporting from the MOSAiC expedition
With the research vessel Polarstern moored to a suitable ice floe, SLF researcher David Wagner and his colleagues start to explore their surroundings and install measuring instruments. Things rarely go entirely to plan, with visiting polar bears and abrupt ice shifts complicating the work. After arriving at ‘our’ flow, we […]
Read MoreWhat’s in an ice core? – Tobias Erhardt
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 […]
Read MoreDrop and recovery of GPS stations on glaciers by UAV – Guillaume Jouvet
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 […]
Read MoreTracking the pace of the Pliocene and Last Interglacial warmings – Naki Akçar
Recent ice sheet reconstructions and climate models indicate that the polar temperatures and global mean sea level were slightly higher than today at least twice: during the Last Interglacial (LIG; 130,000 to 115,000 years ago) and the Pliocene. Although a dramatic surface lowering of East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) during […]
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