Question: what is the worst injury you have acquired though your job?

Thomas Perriment answered on 10 Jun 2018:

I almost broke my leg on a glacier in Switzerland once, it was so painful! I was climbing up a moraine, which can be a pretty dangerous thing to do. Moraines are deposits of soil and rock, usually formed as glaciers melts and leave the rocks that have fallen onto it in ridges along the edges of the glacier. The rocks that fall on top of the glacier are usually frost-shattered, which means they are created when the water that gets into the cracks and crevices of mountains freezes, and pushes shards of rock out. The rocks that fall down the mountain slopes onto the glaciers, forming the ridges, are usually pretty big and can be very angular.

The reason I was there, was to investigate how the glacier I was looking at had changed over the thousands of years it had been there. Because rocks and soil are often deposited in layers, usually with the youngest at the top and the oldest at the bottom (not always the case!), geologists can investigate these layers to record their characteristics, and try to figure out how each layer was deposited. How the layers were deposited tells us what type of environment there was at the time, which in turn can tell us something about the history of the glacier.

I had to figure out how these ridges were formed, so I was climbing up the edge of a moraine of the glacier I was looking at (google the Tsijiore Nouve Glacier) and slipped whilst trying to get from one boulder to the other – this is super dangerous as I was there by myself and it’s hard to get phone signal where I was. It would have been a very long hop to the nearest mountain hut, but thankfully when I was taking too long to get back to where I was staying someone came on a quadbike looking for me, they looked at my leg and I was good to go!

I have seen much worse when working on oil and gas rigs in the Middle East, including scorpion stings, snake bites, and dangerous chemical spills. Safety should always been your number one priority, no matter where you are working. If I hadn’t had the people at the mountain hut know to send help, I might have been much worse off!