The Otemma glacier and its proglacial area have been extensively studied by the UNIL AlpWISE group in recent years. In 2021, our team joined their field camp for a few weeks to finalize the testing of our drone-based GPR system. In 2022, we shared the camp organization and spent a week acquiring GPR data with the objective of gaining new insights into glacier’s hydrology.
In four days, we acquired more than 460 high-resolution parallel GPR profiles spaced by 1 m, for a total distance of 112 line-km of GPR data. To our knowledge, this represents the largest high-density 3D GPR dataset ever recorded over an alpine glacier. A first glance into the dataset can be found here. Further results will be published soon!
All photos taken by Bastien Ruols.