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At the end of August, the Mountain Ice & Water Lab spent a week camped beside Peyto Glacier in the Canadian Rockies, investigating how water moves through the rapidly changing landscape exposed by glacier retreat.Our team installed water-level, temperature, and electrical-conductivity sensors across proglacial ponds and streams, drilled shallow groundwater wells, collected water samples for hydrochemistry and stable-isotope analysis, surveyed pond bathymetry, and measured glacier-surface albedo and sediment across the lower glacier. We were lucky with some beautiful weather for data collection during the day, while the evenings were a little more eventful. Several thunderstorms, heavy rain, and even snowstorms meant a few nights eating dinner from the relative comfort of our tents. Despite the weather, morale stayed remarkably high. It was especially rewarding to see our undergraduate and graduate researchers work together, troubleshoot in the field, and take ownership of their projects. We came home with a huge amount of data and are very excited to spend the fall semester digging into it!
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Undergraduate researchers present their summer workLast week, three undergraduate researchers from the Mountain Ice & Water Lab presented their work at the University of Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Symposium. The symposium was a great chance to share the range of field-based mountain research that has been underway in the lab this summer — from glacier melt, to alpine weather monitoring, to understanding how snowmelt moves through mountain landscapes. Bridget Lowe presented Measuring the Effects of Fine-Scale Variability on the Ablation of Peyto Glacier in the Canadian Rockies. Her project examines how differences in glacier surface albedo influence melt at Peyto Glacier. Over the summer, Bridget developed a GIS-based sampling strategy for approximately 100 field measurements across different glacier surfaces and built and tested a portable pyranometer system that will be used during our upcoming Peyto Glacier field campaign. Amanda Hanke presented Monitoring Weather at Haig Lake. Amanda helped design, assemble, test, program, and deploy a meteorological station at Haig Lake in the Castle Watershed. The station is now collecting measurements of air and ground temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, wind and other meteorological variables, expanding our ability to observe environmental conditions in this high-elevation watershed. Dominic Dunn presented From Snow to Streams: Deploying a Mountain Hydrology Monitoring Network. His work focuses on building a network of monitoring sites across the West Castle watershed to understand how snowmelt infiltrates into mountain soils, moves through the subsurface, and ultimately contributes to headwater streams. The network spans environments from the alpine ridge to the valley bottom and combines soil moisture, infiltration, temperature and groundwater observations. It was particularly exciting to see the students presenting not only research results, but also the less visible work that makes mountain field science possible: instrument testing, coding, GIS analysis, equipment design, field deployment and a lot of logistical preparation. Congratulations to Bridget, Amanda and Dominic on a fantastic summer of research and on sharing their work so confidently with the University community! For the first part of the summer, much of our fieldwork has been taking place at Castle Mountain Resort and at the University of Lethbridge’s West Castle Field Station in the valley below. The drive takes about an hour and a half from Lethbridge, and each trip usually involves a full day of carrying equipment, installing sensors, collecting measurements, and troubleshooting whatever the mountain decides to throw at us.  In partnership with the Bogard Aquatic Biochemistry Lab, we are expanding this work to include water-quality indicators, allowing us to examine not only how much water is moving through the system, but also how its characteristics change along the way.
Meet Our Summer Field Team! Summer fieldwork is well underway, and I’m very glad to have Amanda, Bridget, and Dominique as part of the Mountain Ice and Water group this season. All three are Geography students at the University of Lethbridge, and they have already contributed to a busy mix of lab preparation, sensor testing, field installations, and data collection. Amanda has focused much of her summer on preparing and installing a new weather station at Haig Lake. This has involved testing sensors in the lab, planning the deployment, and helping complete the installation in the field. She is also working with climatological data from the Castle basin to help us better understand its hydrology. Bridget will be working on glacier albedo measurements at Peyto Glacier later this summer. She has also taken the lead on salt-dilution streamflow measurements at Castle Mountain and has been ready to jump into other field tasks whenever we need all hands on deck. Dominique is our resident sensor wizard. He has been calibrating and testing instruments from across the lab, programming dataloggers, organizing metadata, and keeping track of incoming data to make sure our equipment is working as expected. I’m very happy to have such a capable and enthusiastic team helping move our research forward this summer. This weekend brings together three closely connected moments: International Glacier Day, World Water Day, and the start of the UN Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences. Together, they highlight a simple reality in mountain regions: ice, water, and climate are tightly linked and changing quickly. Glaciers support water resources, shape access in mountain terrain, and are part of the culture and identity of many regions. They are also rapidly retreating in ways that are easy to grasp. We can look at photographs from 20, 10, or even just a few years ago and see how much alpine landscapes have changed as glaciers recede to higher elevations. Recent global studies show that nearly all glaciers on Earth have changed over the past decades (Dussaillant et al., 2024), with accelerating losses in recent years (Menounos et al., 2025, Hugonnet et al., 2021). This change can be measured and tracked, showing how quickly conditions are shifting as temperatures rise.  One of the key consequences of this change is how it affects water downstream, in ways that are far less visible than glacier retreat itself. As glaciers shrink, the storage, timing, and pathways of water through mountain systems are shifting. This is changing when water is available, how much is available, and increasing pressure during low-flow periods. The close succession of Glacier Day and World Water Day reflects this fundamental connection. In response to these changes, the UN Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences (2025–2034) has been launched as a global initiative to advance research and support informed action. It calls on scientists, governments, and communities to work together to better understand the cryosphere and to safeguard the billions of people who depend on it. At the Mountain Ice and Water Lab, we work to better understand how these changes are reshaping mountain water systems. Over the coming years, we’ll continue building the knowledge needed to make sense of a rapidly changing water cycle. This includes starting new projects in the Canadian Rockies to investigate these linkages, continuing and building new collaborations, training and recruiting students, expanding fieldwork, and using hydrological modelling to better understand ongoing changes, while ensuring our work helps address some of the most pressing water challenges facing society. We’re looking forward to the work ahead and to sharing what we learn along the way.  More information:
We’re excited to share that we are recruiting an MSc student to work on snowmelt–groundwater dynamics in mountain headwaters, starting May or September 2026. The project will combine field instrumentation in the Castle region (Southern Alberta) with hydrological modelling to understand how snowmelt contributes to groundwater recharge and seasonal water availability under a changing climate. This is a great opportunity for a student interested in mountain hydrology, cryosphere processes, and climate impacts, with opportunities for both fieldwork and modelling development. Key details
See poster below and here for more details.
We are pleased to announce a fully funded PhD position starting September 2026 at the Mountain Ice & Water Lab (University of Lethbridge), focusing on groundwater dynamics in the proglacial zone of Peyto Glacier. This project investigates how meltwater from snow and glacial ice infiltrates evolving proglacial landscapes and contributes to groundwater storage and streamflow. The work combines field monitoring in glacier forefields with process-based hydrological and 3D groundwater modelling, offering a unique opportunity to study emerging hydrological systems in newly deglaciated terrain. Position Highlights
Full project description and application instructions are available in the poster below and here Informal enquiries and early expressions of interest are encouraged by mid-January 2026. If you're interested in mountain hydrology, subsurface processes, or cryosphere–climate interactions and excited to join a collaborative research team, we’d love to hear from you.
We’re excited to announce the official launch of the Mountain Ice & Water Lab at the University of Lethbridge!  |
AuthorThis page shares lab news, project updates, field dispatches, student opportunities, and announcements. We post about ongoing research progress, team activities, publications, upcoming talks, and ways to get involved with our work. Archives
July 2026
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