It’s only natural that for her Ph.D. research, Ulyana Horodyskyj found herself rappelling down a Himalayan cliff. After all, she got bitten by the mountaineering bug at age 6, when she witnessed her first avalanche in the Swiss Alps. Trained first in astrophysics, Horodyskyj is now a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder, a school where rock climbing and glaciology go hand in hand. For a month last summer she crawled over and up the ice and rock of the mighty Ngozumpa glacier in Nepal, almost within spitting distance of Mount Everest. Her goal: to capture the mercurial b... (p. 32)