If you gaze into a river long enough, the river will gaze back at you. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, this is the impression one gets when watching Alexander Sukhodolov at work on the Tagliamento. With slow, fluid movements, he sets up his experiment anew each morning, yet it is always the same. With deft movements, he unrolls cables and installs intricate measuring instruments. Then, he begins observing his ever-changing research subject.

For the past 13 years, Sukhodolov has spent every summer on the Tagliamento, a wild river that bisects the Friuli region in northeastern Italy. He spends the rest of the year conducting research at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Berlin, where the city and scientific community dictate the pace of his life as an ecohydrologist.
Here, the Tagliamento, one of the last free-flowing rivers in the Central Alps, determines Sukhodolov’s rhythm: its water level, hours of sunshine, sediment load, and rainfall.

“Working on the Tagliamento requires patience,” says Sukhodolov. “The river doesn’t readily share its secrets.” 
However, the answers it holds—how to prevent fish kills in the face of the climate crisis, how to cope with increasing floods and droughts, and perhaps even the solution to one of the great puzzles of mathematics—are worth yielding to the river’s pace.