Tag along for a cable car trip to a Bond-villain-style laboratory on Germany’s tallest mountain, where a physicist uses powerful lasers to monitor the atmosphere.
A siren wails, then Hannes Vogelmann slams the door and guides the steel cab out into the abyss.
The small private cable car slips out over pristine snow, bouncing and rocking gently on the wire.
Snarls of jagged limestone occasionally pierce the bright white ice below.
We’re climbing towards the summit of Zugspitze, Germany’s tallest mountain.
For skiers and tourists, a ride to the top is a chance to marvel at the dizzying views before gliding down the slopes.
But for Dr Vogelmann, driving a cable car is just a regular part of his commute to work.
He makes this hour-long journey to the summit several nights each week.
As he barks his progress on a radio in German, he points out some of the perils of working in the Alps.
“An avalanche just came down this huge slope here,” he says. “It was like an earthquake.”
‘Remote snow house’
Our destination is tucked just below the peak.
Schneefernerhaus is one of the highest environmental research stations in the world.
The German word translates roughly — and very appropriately — to “remote snow house”.
Originally a hotel built in the 1930s, the 12-storey building is made from stone and metal and glass.
It’s perched on a slope peppered with jutting rocks and avalanche barriers.
Dozens of scientists now work here on projects ranging from monitoring radiation levels to testing new products and drugs at high altitudes.
Dr Vogelmann is a physicist and climate scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
His laboratory sits at the top of Schneefernerhaus.
From this haunt he fires colourful lasers into the night sky — and records what bounces back.
By capturing this reflected light, he’s able to work out the concentration of greenhouse gases and other aerosols in the upper atmosphere.
“The most important thing about preventing climate change or environmental destruction is to understand how it works,” Dr Vogelmann says.
“And this is one of the few places in the world where we can do measurements like this.”
Prepared for the peaks
Dr Vogelmann has lived and worked in the Alps all his life. And it shows.
He’s fit and trim, unperturbed by the thin atmosphere, and constantly scanning the slopes around us for signs of danger.
In his spare time, he climbs mountains, skis on unmarked slopes, and scrambles up icy cliffs.
He’s an alpinist — someone who enjoys challenging themselves here among the Alps.
But he says the term encompasses more than just conquering snowy peaks. It’s a kind of philosophy, celebrating nature while being immersed in it.
“It’s more than doing sports,” he says.
“[It’s] always with respect to the nature of the Alps.”
This experience has also helped prepare him for the sudden and violent changes up here.
Life at the top
As we approach Schneefernerhaus, Dr Vogelmann slows the cable car and guides it into its berth.
We step out onto an icy patio carved out of the rocky cliff as skiers call out to one another below us.
The research station’s entrance looks like it might lead to a fortified bunker.
But inside the entrance hall, we see glimpses of spectacular snow-capped views through the rooms around us.
“Welcome to Schneefernerhaus, probably the highest environmental observatory in Germany,” Dr Vogelmann says.
The bowels of the research station are more like a moody mountain lair.
“It’s a little bit like a place for producing a James Bond movie,” Dr Vogelmann says.
Winding passages and tunnels are often chiselled directly into the rock, sometimes ending abruptly.
Porthole windows are covered with thick layers of snow, and permafrost covers some sections of the rock face.
There’s even a train station, blasted into the mountain years ago for the original hotel’s guests.
“It’s probably the highest underground station in Germany or even in Europe,” Dr Vogelmann mentions as he pushes open a thick door to reveal the tunnel.
It’s now used to ferry up supplies and larger kit.
The sum of all these parts makes Schneefernerhaus feel dramatic — and eerie — especially at night.
“It’s very dark, and it’s very quiet,” Dr Vogelmann says.
“It sometimes can be scary in particular if it’s windy outside because you have these howling noises everywhere.”
A dangerous laser lab
The door to Dr Vogelmann’s laser laboratory is surrounded with warnings.
“We operate huge lasers with a high level of output power,” Dr Vogelmann says.
We head in and — as all physicists should — he excitedly shows me his favourite lasers.
He even switches one on, and a green beam fires out of a box, bouncing off several mirrors.
“Stay away from it because it’s dangerous,” he warns.
To demonstrate this, he grabs a piece of wood and sticks it into the beam. It immediately starts sizzling.
“So if you put your fingers in that, it’s really painful [and] it would make you blind immediately,” he says with a grin.
Signals from the night sky
These huge, dangerous lasers are used for what’s called LiDAR, or “light detection and ranging”.
The technique is similar to a radar, Dr Vogelmann explains, except it uses light pulses instead of radio waves.
When a laser pulse hits a molecule suspended high up in the atmosphere, some of the light is reflected down to Schneefernerhaus.
Minute fluctuations in this “backscatter” light are captured by a separate device on the rooftop.
Dr Vogelmann is particularly interested in monitoring water vapour concentrations in the upper atmosphere.
“Water vapour is the most important greenhouse component of the atmosphere,” he says.
“It contributes about 60 per cent of the entire greenhouse effect, which is not known by most people because everybody talks about CO2.”
It’s natural and normal for water vapour to be in the atmosphere. But Dr Vogelmann says that as human-produced greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere, this warmer air can then hold more water vapour.
“That additional water vapour makes additional warming.”
There’s some evidence water vapour may have an even greater impact in the upper atmosphere, but there is limited data about how much is up there, how long it stays there, and whether that’s been changing.
“Most of the water molecules in the atmosphere are not visible,” he says.
“We need high-power and complex measurement devices to make [them] visible for our scientists.”
Being on top of Germany’s tallest mountain lets Dr Vogelmann make much more precise measurements than he could from below.
“This is one of the reasons why we are up here on the mountain — because we are very close to the altitude we are interested in,” he explains.
“The other thing is that the air is not contaminated with local pollution and local sources of smoke.”
So, from this alpine lair, he watches for any worrying changes way up in the sky.
Climate change in the Alps
Before we take the last cable car back down the mountain, we head up to the roof of the institute to look out over the jagged grey limestone ranges.
“Mountains are very sensitive to climate change,” Dr Vogelmann says as he gazes across the Alps.
“A glacier or everlasting snow field is very sensitive to small changes of temperature.”
Mountains are experiencing more dramatic warming than lower elevations, with increasing snowmelt and changing patterns of snowfall.
During his time working at Schneefernerhaus, Dr Vogelmann has watched one glacier fade away right outside his window.
“When I started here 20 years ago, this glacier was still quite big,” he says.
“[In] 120 years, it lost 90 per cent of its volume and 80 per cent of its area.”
It’s a stark reminder that Dr Vogelmann’s work has far-reaching implications.
But the alpinist and physicist is hopeful that scanning the skies for signs of trouble will contribute to smarter policies to preserve fragile environments like the Alps for future generations.
And, he adds, coming up here each night and acting as a kind of guardian or steward for these peaks is a privilege.
“I found a place where I can bring together mountains and environmental research with laser development.
“Being on the top of a mountain, looking into the sky at all the stars, shooting a laser beam up there … that’s really cool.”
Carl Smith’s travel for this story was partly funded by the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) in Heidelberg, Germany as part of a fellowship program that guarantees journalistic independence.