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  • CAREER FEATURE

Science on the edge: how extreme outdoor skills enhanced our fieldwork

Researchers describe how they developed extraordinary physical skills for their research and how to stay calm in the face of risks.
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  1. Shihab Jamal

    1. Shihab Jamal is a freelance journalist in Sana’a, Yemen.

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A man wearing a helmet with a head torch crouches while moving through an icy cave with many icicles

Jason Gulley learnt ice climbing to study cave formations in glaciers such as the Ngozumpa glacier in Nepal. Credit: Jason Gulley

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.

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Nature 631, 695-697 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02311-x

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