Science on the edge: how extreme outdoor skills enhanced our fieldwork
From Nature:
One summer evening in 2004, around the campfire during a rock climbing trip to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, Doug Benn, a glaciologist at the University of St Andrews, UK, shared a photo with Jason Gulley. It was a picture of a 6-metre-deep hole, shaped like an upside down ‘L’ in the walls of the Khumbu Glacier, the highest glacier in the world at an altitude of 7,600 m on the southwestern slopes of Mount Everest in Nepal. Then a final-year undergraduate geology student at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Gulley thought that the hole’s shape looked like the result of meltwater drainage, which hinted that long, intricate caves can form and melt in glaciers. But, it would be impossible to work out exactly how those processes happen without getting inside these voids.
