Field Notice · Season 51
Strata Survey is an independent institute for alpine geology. For fifty years our field teams have mapped, cored, and catalogued the high ranges — reading uplift, ice, and erosion as one continuous text.
Strata Survey was founded in 1974 by a splinter group of university geologists who wanted more time on the mountain and less in committee. The founding party spent its first season in two canvas tents below the Verren icefall; the institute now operates three permanent high-altitude stations and a year-round program of survey expeditions.
Our work is patient by design. We resurvey the same transects decade after decade, because the value of a measurement compounds with every return. A single stake tells you where the ice is; forty years of stakes tell you where it is going.
Everything we record — cores, traverses, wind, water, rock — enters one open archive. The mountain writes slowly. Our job is to keep reading.
Perched on a granite shoulder above the Verren icefall and crewed year-round by a rotating team of four. The highest kitchen in the range, and by long tradition the best one.
The col funnels katabatic wind straight off the plateau. The station's anemometer record has run unbroken since 1983 — through storms that took the roof, twice.
The lowest and warmest of the three, where cores come down the mountain to be split, logged, and archived. Home to the institute's library and its only reliable hot water.
Stake line seven re-measured. The ice has thinned another 1.9 metres since last spring; the crew could see the 1998 bolt anchors hanging free, a metre of air beneath them.
Meridian Col logged its windiest April on station record: a katabatic event that pinned the crew indoors for two days and recalibrated everyone's respect for the plateau.
The winter instrument run came home with a full set: nine days, four cols, one cracked ski, and zero gaps in the data. The archive closes the year complete.
05 · Field Seasons
Each autumn the institute accepts a small number of field assistants for the coming season — carrying, coring, cooking, and learning to read rock in its own language. Strong legs help. Patience helps more.
Enquire about a season