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Will Gadd, a professional ice climber, ascends fixed ropes out of a vertical cave on the Greenland ice sheet.

The World Through a Lens

A Stunning Look at the Hidden Mysteries of Glacier Caves

A group of scientists and adventure athletes are venturing into icy labyrinths to study their relationships with glacial melting and climate change.

Photographs and Text by Jason Gulley

I was dangling from a thin nylon rope, some 250 feet from the bottom of an icy shaft. Looking up, I noted the spindrift — blinding snow whipped into a frenzy by howling winds — that was sandblasting the entrance, some 20 feet above me. I was glad to be out of the weather, hanging in near silence.

As my eyes adjusted to the lower light, I found myself staring down into a chasm that was far bigger than anything I thought we might find beneath the surface of the Greenland ice sheet.

All I could think was: “This shouldn’t be here.”

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David Ochel inside the Greenland ice sheet.
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Annelie Bergstrom, a Swedish glacier cave explorer, negotiates a tight squeeze inside Alaska’s Matanuska Glacier.

It was 2018, and I was on an expedition with Will Gadd, a Canadian adventure athlete, to explore moulins, or giant vertical caves, in the Greenland ice sheet. Will was already at the bottom of the shaft. From my vantage point, he looked like an insect with a headlamp.

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Ryan Strickland, a Ph.D. student at the University of Arkansas, skirts an ice formation inside Nepal’s Ngozumpa Glacier. Ice in glacier caves oozes like silly putty and deforms under its own weight. As gravity tugged on the roof of this cave, the slowly sagging ceiling pressed these icicles into natural works of art.
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Dr. Matthew Covington, top, a glacier researcher, ascends out of a moulin in the Greenland ice sheet while David Ochel, below, removes their rigging. Dr. Covington is part of a small group of glacier researchers who are using advanced vertical caving techniques to explore and study Greenland’s glacier caves.

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