The glaciologist Benedikt Schnyder lives and works in the Swiss canton Wallis, in the winter sport paradise Saas-Fee, surrounded by snow-covered Alpine peaks. For 35 years, he has registered the development of the glaciers, the steady retreat of the ice and the respective dangers and ecological damages. This film accompanies him on his often very dangerous work in the mountains, where crevasses, avalanches and ice falls endanger even such experienced mountaineers as Benedikt Schnyder. Seven times he has already fallen from a mountain or has been buried there. With the help of steam and core drillings he explores the conditions of the ice. Equipped with a binocular and a camera he surveys the glacier from a helicopter, but in the end he always climbs the ice on foot, with his ice axe, to do his research like a detective.