In August and September 2019, a team of four humans and two robots set out to survey a set of high-altitude lakes in the Indian trans-Himalayan region. The purpose of this expedition was two-fold; for the robots to explore the lakes, providing a perspective on them impossible from human eyes, and for the humans to assess the amount of human litter in and around the lakes, with a special emphasis on plastic. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing our experiences and imagery from the expedition in the form of blogposts on this blog, and will eventually be cross-posting them on National Geographic’s OpenExplorer portal as well.

This expedition was supported by a National Geographic Early Career Grant and by the National Geographic/OpenROV S.E.E. Initiative.