CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Ugo Nanni

Ugo Nanni is a glaciologist. He uses seismology to listen to the glaciers, to listen to their cracks, to the melting water, to the crevasses and to their collapse. After three years in Norway and a couple of years wandering between art, science and politics he is now established in Grenoble (France) where he investigates glacial and paraglacial floods in poorly instrumented areas. Drawing a line between his research and his life, between the glacier and the society, is not what defines Ugo, and this is why he shares the whispers of the glaciers, the voices of those who are not heard.

Dialogues between glaciers and humans

May 15, 2026
against a blue, muted sky a saxophone layer in a beanie plays a song
Torben Snekkestad playing his saxophone in the Tellbreen icecave. Svalbard, March 2025. Credits E. Le Cornec and C. Reymond. CC BY-NC-ND.

At the edge of the world, a voice tries to make itself heard, a whisper slipping between the threads of an unstable reality. In the remote lands of Svalbard, a few hundred miles from the North Pole, lie millennia-old entities, relics of a disappearing species. They murmur in a language that humans today no longer know how to decipher. And yet, it is in this deafness to the voices around them that ...[Read More]

The Polar Night Week and the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System

February 3, 2023
The Polar Night Week and the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System
Moonrise over the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) during the 2023 Polar night Week. Credit: S. Aparicio.

In the early days of 2023, nearly 100 researchers gathered in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, one of the last permanently inhabited places before reaching the North Pole (see my previous blogpost about Svalbard). The Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS) held its fifth Polar Night Week. SIOS is an international partnership of research institutions that study the environment and climate ...[Read More]

The Global Arctic, a personal perspective on interdisciplinary research

October 21, 2022
The Global Arctic, a personal perspective on interdisciplinary research
A not so common vision of the Arctic. The small yellow/red star shows the location of Svalbard, where the summer school took place. This is the triptychial projection of the world. Figure credit: Map modified from Grieger, B. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201834841.

Around the summer solstice of 2022, a small group of twenty young researchers met in Svalbard, a small island lost between Norway and the North Pole. The Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research wanted to bring us together around the theme of “The Global Arctic“. The scope of this summer school was to “produce a better understanding of the significance of the concept of Gl ...[Read More]

Did you know… that glaciers can sing?

June 3, 2022
Did you know… that glaciers can sing?
Figure 1: F. Gimbert and U. Nanni install seismic stations in the Alps before the winter to monitor the dynamics of the Argentiere Glacier in the framework of the SAUSSURE project (https://saussure.osug.fr/). Credits: Nathan Maier.

Have you ever wondered what the voice of a glacier sounds like? Well, listen here! And if you want to know how the glacier makes these sounds, then let’s take a walk on the ice side… Close your eyes and think of the time you were in the middle of the mountains. On a snow plain, a glacier or a frozen lake; just you. You hear your footsteps in the snow, crunching ice. The wind blows through your hoo ...[Read More]