Research cruises are a fundamental part of the cryospheric sciences. As the Arctic warms, the systems that shape our world look much different from one season to the next, making it more critical than ever to measure the changes of our icy world. Here, three early-career researchers share insights from a cruise they took part …[Read More]
Turquoise lakes. Towering Himalayan peaks. A maze of rock, ice and meltwater. At first glance, this hardly looks like a glacier at all (Figure 1)… Yet as glaciers thin and retreat across the Himalayas, networks of meltwater ponds and glacial lakes are forming both on glacier surfaces and at their margins: one of the most …[Read More]
The first time I stood on sea ice, I could not tell which direction the coast was. A community member named Bryan could. That gap in situational awareness, between what a trained remote sensing scientist could read from the landscape and what a local hunter understood instinctively, turned out to mirror almost exactly the gap …[Read More]
Beneath Antarctica’s largest ice shelf lies a hidden ocean—dark, cold, and almost impossible to reach. Scientists drilled through hundreds of metres of ice to access it, revealing a world that plays a crucial role in how ice shelves melt. Years later, we had the chance to explore this unseen environment—not in the field, but through …[Read More]
Traveling by land within Europe is relatively easy, and for me it’s also a conscious choice to push back against the fast pace of modern travel and the normalization of flying. I chose to drive a van instead of taking the train mainly because of my dog, and because finding pet-friendly accommodation during the high …[Read More]
I remember the day very well. It was the first time we drove up to the glacial ice from our base station in Kangerlussuaq (Western Greenland), where we had patiently been waiting for two days for the weather to clear. I took this photo during a three-week fieldwork campaign in July of 2025 as part of …[Read More]
Only one month after starting my PhD, I found myself in a tiny plane flying over one of the most beautiful and breathtaking landscapes I’ve ever seen. I was on the way to the northernmost settlement in the world – the research village Ny-Ålesund. What I expected from the trip: cold temperatures, darkness, and lots …[Read More]
Would you like to follow the endeavours of a small team working in the ice-marginal terrain in South-West Greenland? They set out to investigate proglacial lakes using sediment coring, water sampling and gas collections (figure 1), aiming to better understand methane dynamics, proglacial terrain development and the environmental drivers behind methane production in glacially influenced lake …[Read More]
In this week’s blog, Levan Tielidze tells us about his participation in a scientific expedition to Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, during the 2024–2025 field season. The journey, commencing in Australia and passing through South Africa, led him to the “surreal” and “awe-inspiring” Antarctic landscape. The team, a collaborative effort from Monash University, and the University …[Read More]
I’m Himanshu Kaushik, a PhD student working under the guidance of Dr. Mohd Farooq Azam at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore (India). Seven years ago, I took my first steps onto the Chhota Shigri Glacier (CSG) in the Indian (Western) Himalaya, and it felt like stepping into another world. Surrounded by the towering peaks, …[Read More]
