I grew up in Salzburg, Austria, and was always very fond of mountaineering. During my PhD, I used satellite data to measure the ice flow of large and remote glaciers in Iceland and polar regions that couldn’t be accessed in the field. This helped me study how quickly glacial ice flows. The subject fascinated me, and I decided to pursue a career in which I could travel to and study the glaciers in person instead of spending my days in front of a computer screen.
In October 2021, on a fieldwork trip to the Jamtalferner glacier near Galtür, Austria, my colleagues and I found this big, beautiful cave in the middle of the glacier. In this photo, I’m inside the cave. In the background, there are bubbles of 300-year-old air trapped in the ice. It’s quite unusual for glaciers to be hollow, so I was curious about how the cavities formed.
During the trip, we discovered that the cavities were much larger than we expected, especially compared with those that had already been documented.
Who wants to be a polar bear?
This glacier has been studied extensively since 1892. I go there with my colleagues about once every three weeks to measure the ice ourselves: it is melting rapidly. We are seeing changes not only in the glacier’s mass, but also where local plant species grow. For instance, certain plants and trees have begun to appear in regions that had previously been covered by glacial ice.
On this trip, we figured out how large the cavities were. At that time, the cave was already showing signs of collapse, and by June 2022, it was completely gone.
In glaciology, there is often no way to determine the precise conditions of an earlier time. A glacier might look the same from the outside, but it changes constantly inside: ice flows down and melts, snow cover grows and subsides. You can never come back to the exact same glacier; we can observe only the now.
Source: Ecology - nature.com
