CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Fieldwork

Cryo Adventures – Installing a weather station on the Greenland Ice Sheet

September 2, 2022
Cryo Adventures – Installing a weather station on the Greenland Ice Sheet
Putting the final touches on the “old” weather station (right) and newly setup GC-Net station (center) at NEEM before leaving them for a year of measurements. Photo credit: Anja Rutishauser.

Soaking up the sun and recharging batteries on a peaceful and quiet summer day, or fighting to stay upright during extreme snow storms in the middle of winter, while continuously recording valuable air temperature, pressure, wind-speed and so much more – such is the life of an automatic weather station on the Greenland ice sheet. Even though they are so remote, sitting by themselves surround ...[Read More]

Current challenges: high-altitude Chilean glacier monitoring in an extended drought

April 29, 2022
Current challenges: high-altitude Chilean glacier monitoring in an extended drought
Olivares Alfa Glacier in January 2021, Photo credit: Alejandro Silva.

Central Chile has been facing a long dry period since 2010, marked by a high mean precipitation deficit, a so-called Mega Drought (MD) (Garreaud et al., 2019). This, besides long-term temperature increase (Burger et al., 2018; Falvey & Garreaud, 2009), has affected negatively the glaciers’ mass balance in the region mainly due to low snow accumulation throughout a hydrological year (which is f ...[Read More]

Icy fieldwork: real or April Fool’s?

April 1, 2022
Icy fieldwork: real or April Fool’s?
Photo credit: Katja Laute (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Those of us fortunate to participate in cryo-fieldwork are well aware of the unique, hilarious, and sometimes bizarre scenarios that we often find ourselves in. For this year’s April Fool’s Day, the EGU Cryosphere Blog team shares crazy anecdotes, with a catch: one of these stories is fake! Are you able to tell fact from fiction? Fill in the (twitter) poll, and time will tell if you are right…!! W ...[Read More]

CryoAdventures – Three months in Nuuk, the world’s northernmost capital!

December 10, 2021
Dark sky with greenish Aurora Borealis.
Northern lights over Nuuk [credit: Jenny Arthur]

I have just returned from nearly three months in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, where I was doing my PhD placement at Asiaq Greenland Survey. Read on to find out what science I got up to… everything from mapping mountain glacier snowline change to avalanches! How do you map glacier snowline evolution? During my PhD research placement, I was working at Asiaq Greenland Survey in their Hydrolo ...[Read More]

Cryo-adventures – Undertaking Cryo-Fieldwork in a Global Pandemic!

September 3, 2021
Cryo-adventures – Undertaking Cryo-Fieldwork in a Global Pandemic!
Looking out over Fjallsjökull from the top of the nearby moraine ridge. Photo credit: Nathaniel Baurley

Have you ever wondered what undertaking cryo-fieldwork in a glacial environment typically involves? Well, what about undertaking cryo-fieldwork in a glacial environment during a global pandemic?! Read on to find out all about the challenges I faced on my recent trip to Iceland in July 2021… Fieldwork Preparation As this previous blog post highlights, undertaking cryo-fieldwork requires a significa ...[Read More]

Re-discovering the British North Greenland Expedition 1952-54

August 13, 2021
Re-discovering the British North Greenland Expedition 1952-54
Figure 1. Map of the major field localities (red dots), including the BNGE bases at Britannia Sø and North Ice, and the approximate traverse route (red lines) of the British North Greenland Expedition (adapted from Hamilton 1956). North East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) is indicated. Base map is a multidirectional hillshade of the 100 m Arctic DEM (25x vertical exaggeration) overlain by the ITS LIVE 120 m ice velocity dataset. Both basemap datasets were accessed via https://qgreenland.org/ [credits: Neil Ross]

How did we (nearly) all forget about, or simply overlook, a large-scale two-year long mid-20th Century scientific expedition to the northern Greenland Ice Sheet? Particularly an expedition that kick-started some significant glaciological and geophysical careers, developed large-scale polar logistical capabilities, traversed the ice sheet, acquired some novel and critical data, and asked some big r ...[Read More]

Running a live stream of proglacial processes

November 4, 2020
Running a live stream of proglacial processes
Sampling in the glacier-fed stream near the field camp. Photo: Floreana Miesen

In Switzerland, nothing is really remote, but some places are more so than others. Dense infrastructure networks typically provide convenient access to research sites in the Alps where it is difficult to feel far away from home. However, this is not always the case… For us, our home for the summer is a bit different. We work at 2400 m above sea level in Southern Switzerland, in a narrow vall ...[Read More]

Exploring the hidden plumbing of glaciers with Cryoegg

July 17, 2020

Plumbing is something we take for granted: the pipes that bring us water to wash and drink, and the pipes that take the waste water away again. We see the taps and basins in our kitchen and bathroom – but the pipes are hidden away under the floor or inside the walls – and we mostly ignore them until there’s a leak or a blockage! It turns out that glaciers have plumbing too – and ...[Read More]

Life of a scientist: When fieldwork doesn’t go to plan…

March 27, 2020

Climate research questions tend to focus on the future. What will global temperature be in 2100? Will extreme weather events become more frequent? When will sea level rise render coastal homes uninhabitable? But our understanding of climate processes first comes from observing the past: palaeoclimatology. To get these records, scientists often go on fieldwork to collect samples. But what happens w ...[Read More]

Cryo-adventures – Behind the scenes of cryo-fieldwork

October 25, 2019
Cryo-adventures – Behind the scenes of cryo-fieldwork
Figure 1: On top of Svínafellsjökull glacier, Iceland 2018 [Credit: Saule Akhmetkaliyeva].

As the Arctic is warming faster than the global average, Arctic glaciers are rapidly melting. My research is about the fate of glacial organic carbon when the ice containing it melts. To investigate these processes, I travelled to several glaciers, an activity full of challenges… and rewards! My research Glacier ice covers about 11% of Earth’s land surface, and contains within it a globally ...[Read More]