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A Melting Swiss Glacier Has Revealed Human Remains—Again

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The Best U.S. National Parks for Northern Lights Hunting—and Why This Is a Good Year to See Them

Brent McGregor first learned of the caves under Mt. Hood’s Sandy Glacier from a 2010 YouTube video that showed hikers around one of the entrances. An accomplished caver, the then 58-year-old from Sisters, Oregon, was in the midst of writing a book on the state’s caves and convinced his caving partners Eddy Cartaya and Scott Linn to help him locate an entrance. In July 2011, the three rappelled into what is now agreed to be the largest known glacier cave system in the lower 48 states. They became the first to fully explore and map a mile-long cave and, borrowing from avalanche terminology, dubbed it Snow Dragon. Since then, they’ve located two other caves under the glacier–Pure Imagination and Frozen Minotaur–and worked with astro-biologists and geologists to analyze artifacts, like feathers and bugs, trapped in the ice and measure the caves’ rapidly changing volume. This June, along with German climatologist Andreas Pflitsch and photographer Josh Hydeman, the team completed their third scientific expedition, hoping to figure out how these massive caves were formed and what they tell us about the glacier above. Photo: In recent years, data collected from the cave system has unlocked an important clue in tracking glacial loss. Mass loss in glaciers has traditionally been calculated using surface measurements from aircraft and satellites, which ignore “under-ice melting” that creates cave systems. But McGregor and Cartaya have shown that in thinner glaciers like Sandy, where caves are less likely to collapse from the weight of the ice and warm air is able to circulate, mass loss from caves is significant. They hope to provide critical new information for understanding its impact on water resources and global sea level rise.

Exploring the Otherworldly Ice Caves Below Mount Hood