The Otemma Glacier is also a camping site – at least for researchers keen to understand its hydrological system. | Photo: Bastien Ruols

The orange tents look a little lost on the frozen river. To the left, an abyss awaits and would carry them down into the valley. To the right, the Pigne d’Arolla rises up to where the river has its source. It was here, on the Otemma Glacier in the canton of Valais, that a group of geophysicists from the University of Lausanne camped for several days and nights in the summer of 2023.

“The cold was incredible. I really suffered”, says Bastien Ruols, the doctoral student who took this picture with a drone. It was the first time that they had set up camp directly on ice. One of their colleagues had brought the idea back from Canada. It meant many shivering hours but provided many new opportunities too. Researchers normally spend the night near the glacier and have the hard task of climbing up it early in the morning.

But camping on the ice enabled them to create a 3D model of the glacier’s hydrological system more efficiently. “We use drones to make as many radar measurements of the ground as possible, and base our model on them. By camping on-site, we were able to start measuring right after waking up”, says Ruols. “We want to understand the movements in the ice better – such as the changes in its water channels”.

The viscous dynamics of the glacier are highly complex, as can be seen from the multitude of cracks on its surface, which from above looks like a sheet of slate. There are fine lines criss-crossing the glacier beneath the campsite, their intersecting diagonals seeming to divide it up into different little sectors. “It fractures in all directions”, says Ruols. There is also a small hole to be seen on the right-hand side of the photo. “We had to be careful when we went to the toilet at night”, he says.

Ruols was careful to leave their toilet out of his photo. This image of their frosty camp looks almost unearthly, and it won an award in the 2024 image competition of the Swiss National Science Foundation. At 2,700 metres above sea level, it seems a world away from everyday concerns. “I’d do it again”, says Ruols enthusiastically. “Getting out of your tent on a morning and seeing the sunrise, or looking out at night to see the Milky Way without any light pollution: that’s something extraordinary”.