The SPI (Swiss Polar Institute) Flagship Programme PAMIR is an interdisciplinary undertaking to characterize the current state of the Pamir cryosphere to an unprecedented degree, as well as its impacts on ecosystems, hazards and water resources. Within the RIVER lab the objectives are: i) extract an ice core to unlock a climate archive of the past millennium; ii) assess the distribution and state of permafrost; iii) measure the mass balance and accumulation of glaciers at a regional level; iv) establish the link between microbial adaptation and a rapidly changing cryosphere; v) disentangle regional cryospheric hazards by understanding glaciological and permafrost drivers; and finally: vi) unravel the lost history of Pamir cryospheric research. Together, these ambitious scientific objectives will generate important historic and contemporary understanding of this key headwater region, enabling a better understanding of the future of this water tower.
We primarily focus on objective iv), establishing the link between microbial adaptation and a rapidly changing cryosphere.
Project website: https://pamir-project.ch/
Project Leader: Zhe Liu, PhD student
Support by RIVER lab member Gregoire Michoud, Nicola Deluigi, Florian Baier and Ewa Ponieacka and Hannes Peter Markus
Principial Investigator: Prof Tom I. Battin
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