I had brought the only ‘dumb’ phone on the expedition and while all the batteries on everyone else’s state of the art mobiles ran out of power one by one, I was still able to get weather updates for our location from my girlfriend back home in Innsbruck. This proved to be a great way to plan the next day’s activities, where we could estimate how far to travel around the glacier before bad weather brought in fresh snow dumps. Still, it was a good hour’s walk back up from the glacier each time to the safe camp close to the station, and the promising warmth and escape that retreat offered incase the weather turned truly malicious. Thankfully before our time on the glacier came to an end, our luck changed and we were blessed with two great weather days. In order to maximize the short time now left to us, we decided to embrace this opportunity and rise from our sleeping bags at first light and be away from tents no later than 8:00am; a normal workday awakening like any other, except we were trading the usual office destination for the unknown of the ice below us.

On the glacier itself many more moulins had opened up since last years expedition. Our team decided to split into two smaller groups and descend down the friendliest looking opening first. I flitted between both parties, desperately trying to capture as many images of this wonderful environment, one that I had never witnessed before. A short abseils from the surface – rope belayed around giant erratic rocks or ice screws carefully placed in hard ice sheltered away from the hot searing sunshine – and we were truly beneath the surface of the glacier.

Heavily sculptured walls, carved into magnificent shapes throughout the ice, reminded me of shapes I had seen before in cylindrical shaped caves formed in limestone, a more familiar environment for me. And I couldn’t help notice rocks and pebbles of varying sizes wedged in the roof of the moulins, some over ten meters up, partly exposed and partly trapped in the ice. I wondered how long it would be before they dropped out and come crashing to the ground. But we didn’t hang around to find out. Some members of each team set about surveying the caves as far as the depths took them, while other members explored the ways on rigging rope traverse around frozen pools of water or small drops down to other levels of the system. Team member Sam Doyle, a Glaciologist from the University of Aberystwyth who spends most of his time in Greenland studying the rate in which the ice sheet is moving, drew many comparisons with his previous studies and the moulins on the Gorner Glacier. Moving at 15m a year the Gorner glacier picks up speed due to meltwater falling through these moulins and acting like a lubricant along the base of the glacier helping it along its way.

Within the small two day weather window up on the Gorner Glacier we discovered, surveyed and photographed three giant systems, which will no doubt be in totally different places next time round. However, seeing how vast and extensive these moulins can be just goes to show how much water they take during the summer months and thus leading to rapid increase in the rate in which these glaciers move and shrink in size. Sadly, it seems, it won’t be long before we are without glaciers in Europe.