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]
Fieldwork
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]
The Arctic’s Blind Spot: Why Satellites Struggle Where Ice Meets the Coast
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]
Memories from the Field – The Vastness of the Greenland Ice Sheet
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]
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
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
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
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]
Did you know? We can see what’s going on inside an ice shelf using geophysics!
Understanding what is going on inside an ice shelf is important for many reasons. But mostly, it allows us to better understand their contribution to sea level rise, and to understand how they are changing and evolve over time, with our changing climate. Geophysical methods offer a means to be able to see inside an …[Read More]