Cryoconite is a fancy word for dirt on a glacier. Which is why my friend, Martin, who I was roped to on a Swiss glacier, seemed amused at how often I wanted to stop between jumping crevasses to excitedly photograph the mud puddles.

At one point he pointed out it’s basically the same dirt we had been hiking over beside the glacier that was blowing down onto the ice.

But the difference to me is how the bacteria and other microscopic life in that dirt change in their growth patterns with the addition of water. I study the microscopic life in cryoconite holes on Antarctic glaciers (see more about that project here). I was very excited to see cryoconite in a different part of the world.

Other groups are studying cryoconite on alpine glaciers, like these guys and these guys and these guys. This glacier looked very different than our study glaciers in Antarctica, partly because it was more of an entire debris field rather than isolated little islands of sediment, more like the cryoconite at the Alaskan site that my friend, Jack, just published a neat paper on.

Below you can see the difference between small, shallow, muddy cryoconite holes on the alpine glacier (left) and the larger, ice-lidded Antarctic holes that appear as dark circles of clearer blue ice (right).

Alpine glacier cryoconite holes

Frozen lids over Antarctic cryoconite holes