March 1, 2026

Cryologger Featured in ECO Magazine: Tracking Icebergs Under Budget

Posted by Adam Garbo

Deploying a Cryologger Ice Tracking Beacon on an ice island fragment of the Milne Ice Shelf in the Canadian Arctic in 2025.

Tracking Icebergs Under Budget

I’m excited to share that the Cryologger project was recently featured in ECO Magazine in a full-length article titled Tracking Icebergs Under Budget.

Produced in collaboration with Tadiran Batteries, the article focuses on the development of the Cryologger Ice Tracking Beacon (ITB) platform and the practical challenges associated with long-duration autonomous monitoring in the Arctic.

The article discusses topics including low-power system design, Arctic battery performance, open-source instrumentation, and the realities of deploying scientific systems in remote polar environments where maintenance or recovery is often impossible once the instruments are deployed.

Building Instruments for the Arctic

Developing instrumentation for Arctic environments means designing systems that can operate for long periods without maintenance, survive extreme cold, and remain reliable in places where recovery may never be possible.

These constraints shaped many aspects of the Ice Tracking Beacon platform, including the use of commercially available components, low-power system design, and hardware intended for long-duration deployments in remote environments.

Over the past several years, Cryologger systems have been deployed on dozens of icebergs and ice islands across the Canadian Arctic, where they have continued operating through freeze–thaw cycles, snow burial, iceberg breakups, and multi-year deployments.

These deployments provided many of the practical lessons that ultimately shaped the platform and informed the engineering decisions discussed throughout the article.

Read the Full Article

The article is available both through the ECO Magazine digital issue and as a web feature article.