Growing concern about global warming and climate change calls for closer monitoring of the way glaciers behave.

The Glacsweb team, based at the University of Southampton, has installed wireless “electronic pebbles” into the ice to collect information and transmit it over the net to computers elsewhere.

These sensors are placed near the bottom of the glaciers and move with the ice, recording temperature, pressure, speed and the makeup of the glacier’s sediment. They send back data to the surface by radio, and these are picked up on a surface base station, which also records temperature and velocity.

The system includes also a webcam and snow meter, and is able to track the position of the probes.

The base station then sends the information by radio to the monitoring team’s campsite. That data is then fed into a computer and put online to make it available instantly to glaciologists around the world.

The data, which is collected six times a day and transmitted once a day, can also be sent back via SMS messages to the computer.

Details in BBC News.