CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Fieldwork

Chasing glacial lakes in the shadow of Everest

Chasing glacial lakes in the shadow of Everest

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]

When August Brought Snow: Unseasonal Snowfall Disrupts Life in Ladakh’s High Valley Village

When August Brought Snow:  Unseasonal Snowfall Disrupts Life in Ladakh’s High Valley Village

August in Ladakh is a time of golden fields and harvest songs, not snowstorms. Yet in 2025, this rhythm broke. Panikhar village in Ladakh woke beneath fifteen centimetres of snow, an unseasonal blanket that changed the functioning of the valley and stunned its people. What began as a glaciological field trip turned into a firsthand …[Read More]

The Proglacial Puzzle: Sampling of Glacier-fed Lakes in Greenland

The Proglacial Puzzle: Sampling of Glacier-fed Lakes in Greenland

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]

Dreaming & reading about fieldwork – summer blog break 2024

A person is kneeling down at a brown pond, all covered in mosquito net, waterproof gear, kitchen gloves and a pancake flipping spatula.

  As we are starting into our annual blog summer break, we reflect on what summer can mean for polar researchers (including some fieldwork saudades). As an Arctic or Alpine cryo-scientist, chances are that you are somewhere in between vacation, fieldwork or trying to work through data while everyone else is free. If you, like …[Read More]

Women of Cryo VII: Making Fieldwork More Inclusive

a drawing of women doing different scientific activities, with the words 'women of cryo' written

Women make up 50.8% of the world’s population, yet fewer than 30% of the world’s researchers are women. Of this percentage, women of colour comprise around 5%, with less than 1% represented in geoscience faculty positions. Women are published less, paid less, and do not progress as far in their careers as men. Even within our EGU community, women account …[Read More]