I lived under a glacier for two weeks looking for life (The New Scientist)

CHISELLED, grey rock walls loom on all sides, brought to life by the faint beam of my headlamp. Tiny rivulets of groundwater form a tangle of silver threads around me. As I inhale, I smell the heavy scent of cold, damp, stale air, which clings to my face like an invisible cloth. Slowly, I drag my welly-clad feet along the seemingly endless dirt track towards the eye of the tunnel ahead and the guts of the glacier.

I have never had much of a proclivity for caves, but here I was living in a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the Norwegian glacier Engabreen of the Svartisen ice cap. I spent two weeks here in the winter of 2006, coming to visit its tantalisingly named “subglacial laboratory”, where you could access the glacier bed thanks to tunnels originally bored through the mountain to tap the copious meltwater for hydroelectric power.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033331-500-i-lived-under-a-glacier-for-two-weeks-looking-for-life/#ixzz6uNitfGPs