Andreas Alexander is currently a MSCA funded PostDoc working at the University of Bergen and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego on tidewater glacier interactions with the ocean on Greenland and Svalbard. Before that he completed a PhD in glacier hydrology at the University of Oslo and worked as researcher for the Centre of Biorobotics at Tallinn University of Technology. He has a background in mechanical engineering and geosciences and regularly leads expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctica. 

Glacier hydrology describes the way water moves over, in and under glaciers. It controls glacier dynamics and impacts ecosystems, local geohazards, greenhouse gas fluxes and global sea levels. Yet, our scientific understanding of these systems is still limited due to a lack of observational data originating from the extreme environments glacier hydrological systems represent. In this talk I’ll give an overview about glacier hydrological systems and the physical challenges they inherit along with some of the robotic solutions in discussion to solve these challenges. I’ll further highlight what technological challenges would need to be solved for robotic platforms to be able to bring back data from one of the least sampled places on Earth.