A new Perspective paper in Nature Communications Earth & Environment compares the 2021 Chamoli disaster with the recent Blatten avalanche. Why did one kill >200 people while the other caused only one casualty?
Link to paper: www.nature.com/articles/s43...
The winter surveys of #GLAMOS are just around the corner! ❄️⛰️
Yesterday we headed into the field with a big group for a safety training to refresh our techniques and safety protocols. Now let’s hope the #glaciers get plenty of snow so they’re well prepared for spring and summer. 🌨️
At UNIS they studied Svalbard’s glaciology & lower Arctic atmosphere, glaciers, sea ice & permafrost just minutes from the classroom.
We’re grateful for this access to the High Arctic. In their words: “We leave with many fantastic memories & new friendships.”
Life on Svalbard, in the northernmost town in the world.
Two of our team members, PhD student Janosch Beer and master student Valentin Künzler, spent 2 months at 78°N, from polar night, when the sun never rises, into the first light of the Arctic dawn in February.
📢 New paper in Nature Climate Change!
Congrats to our colleague Marit van Tiel on co-authoring “Cascading downstream impacts of water cycle changes in mountain regions”, now featured on the cover! 🌍🎉
How mountain water changes ripple far downstream 👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🚁❄️ Can we measure ice thickness with a GPR system attached to a helicopter in #Greenland?
Yes, we can!
Our new preprint shows successful helicopter-borne radar surveys over outlet glaciers, opening new possibilities for mapping ice thickness.
📄 egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...
🧊 When melting ice becomes a tourist attraction
New comment (incl. @matthias-huss.bsky.social ) on the paradox of #glacier tourism: last-chance visits, short-term fixes, and glaciers as symbols of #climateaction.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Photo: Rhône glacier (Sept 2023)
📄 New preprint by Christophe Ogier et al. 🏔️💧
Hidden subglacial water storage may have contributed to the June 2024 #LaBérarde flood. Model results point to up to ~10⁵ m³ stored beneath Glacier de Bonne Pierre.
🔗 doi.org/10.5194/egus...
📷 Benoît Lagneux
💧Glaciers are water towers for Central Asia, but for how long?
In our study on the Tien Shan, we show that #glacier melt can temporarily boost #runoff until mid-century, but continued ice loss leads to a growing risk of unmet water demand in summer.
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
Latest #GLAMOS report on #glacier change in #Switzerland (2025) out today🧊🇨🇭
** Swiss glaciers lost ~3% of their remaining ice in one year due to a dry winter and a warm summer.
**159 glaciers (11%) have already disappeared.
👉 Full report: doi.glamos.ch/pubs/glbulle...
We’re advertising a fully funded 4-year PhD position on modelling firn changes at the glacier scale within the SNF-funded deFIRN project, based at ETH Zurich & WSL.
Apply here: jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...
@wslresearch.bsky.social @slfdavos.bsky.social
A place where the sun never sets, surrounded by ice for 400 km in any direction. 🇦🇶
We received greetings from our colleagues Ari David and Huw Horgan, currently on the Ross Ice Shelf with @swais2c.bsky.social, drilling into Antarctica’s past to better understand ice-sheet change and sea-level rise.
Glaciers buffer droughts, but for how long?
In the extreme summer of 2022, glacier melt helped sustain Swiss rivers, locally offsetting up to 70% of water deficits. But shrinking glacier area means total meltwater is already declining, a warning sign for future droughts.
👉 doi.org/10.5194/hess...
3. Mass Balance Machine cake
4. The collapsing collapse feature
5. Antarctic subglacial lake cookies
🍰🔬 The festivities continued with the Bake Your Science competition, and this year’s submissions were truly stellar! ⭐ Now it’s time to vote for your favorite!
1. Alaskan permafrost cake
2. Lötschental 1927-2025 cookies
🎄🫕 A wonderful get-together at this year’s VAW Glaciology Christmas fondue! It is our moment to reflect on 2025 together with current and former members of VAW Glaciology and celebrate another year of glaciological research.
🚨 New paper alert! ❄️
How many glaciers will exist by 2100 at +1.5 °C vs +4 °C warming? Our new study led by @landervt.bsky.social , projects the extinction year of ~200,000 glaciers worldwide. 🌍🧊
Can you imagine the Alps with only 20 glaciers remaining?
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Looking beneath a #glacier after a major rock–ice avalanche. 🏔️🧊🚁
Using our helicopter-borne GPR #AIRETH, we surveyed the Scerscen-Eisnase after the April 2024 rock–ice avalanche to map bedrock and internal structures.
Thanks #HeliBernina for the flight!
Many thanks to this week’s Glaciological Seminar speaker, Magali Ponds from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel!
Magali shared fascinating insights into how irrigation influences glacier mass balance in High Mountain Asia.
Check out our upcoming Glaciological Seminars here:
vaw.ethz.ch/en/events/gl...
🌟 Great news from the Swiss Geoscience Meeting! 🌟
Our PhD student Marijn won the Swiss Snow, Ice & Permafrost Society Prize for her presentation on data-driven glacier mass-balance modelling. Well done! 🏔️👏
Explore the Mass Balance Machine project:
github.com/ODINN-SciML/...
@unibe.ch
Ever wondered what a #glacier looks like from the inside? Last weekend our postdocs Christophe Ogier & Marin Kneib descended 60 m into a moulin on the #PlaineMorte glacier for surveying englacial melt channels. Photographer Pierre Jeanneret captured the stunning hidden world below ❄️🧗♂️🧊
🚨 New paper!
Led by Laura Gabriel, we used Surface NMR to probe liquid water inside #Rhonegletscher 🇨🇭🧊💧
Despite heavy noise, SNMR detected a thin (~1 m) water-rich layer, consistent with GPR. A big step toward mapping englacial hydrology with SNMR!
📄 Paper link: tc.copernicus.org/articles/19/...
New paper led by our PhD @alexvdesch.bsky.social ! 🇨🇭🧊
We show how glacio-hydrological model results depend strongly on precipitation forcing and spatial resolution. High-res data = key for reliable #glacier runoff estimates.
Check out the study 📄 hess.copernicus.org/articles/29/...
📢 New paper!
Our colleague Marin Kneib shows that #avalanches are key for glacier survival worldwide.
💡 First global estimate of avalanche contribution to glacier mass balance:
• 11% in the Alps
• 22% in New Zealand
• Negative in the Andes
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
What does glacier fieldwork look like for @matthias-huss.bsky.social , head of #GLAMOS? 🧊📏
Politiken followed him on #PlaineMorte, where he documents the beauty, and rapid loss, of Swiss ice.
📄 politiken.dk/edition/news...
🚨 New paper! ❄️📄
New paper by @matthias-huss.bsky.social Huss, Andreas Bauder & colleagues document the extinction of #Pizolgletscher, using 130+ years of observations 📊🏔️. A rare chance to follow a glacier from a healthy state to its final disappearance.
🔗 doi.org/10.1017/aog.2025.10024
#OpenCall The Polar Access Fund for early-career researchers in polar science is now open!
Applications welcome by 20 January 2026, 12:00 (noon, Swiss time)
Access the call documents: swisspolar.ch/spi-funding-...
We look forward to your applications!
#fieldwork #Arctic #Antarctica
🚨 New paper!
Co-authored by VAW colleagues Marijn van der Meer & @matthias-huss.bsky.social , this new paper present the Mass Balance Machine (MBM), an XGBoost model that predicts seasonal glacier mass balance from sparse data and often beats traditional models.
🔗 tc.copernicus.org/articles/19/...
🌟 Hoeraa! Great news from VAW Glaciology!
Both Prof. Daniel Farinotti and @matthias-huss.bsky.social Huss made it onto Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list, the top 1% most cited scientists worldwide over the past decade. A fantastic achievement! ❄️📚
Aurora over the Alps! 🌌❄️ A powerful solar storm hit Earth, and the northern lights reached far south. Thanks to the long-exposure capabilities of several Alpine webcams, this rare phenomenon was beautifully captured above our #glaciers. The purple glow created magical scenes.
