Step Aboard LéXPLORE — Discover Lake Geneva Like Never Before

🔬 Step Aboard LéXPLORE — Discover Lake Geneva Like Never Before

LéXPLORE platform © Guillaume Cunillera, 2023 – EPFL

Just 600 meters off the harbor of Pully, LéXPLORE floats quietly on the waters of Lake Geneva. From the shore, it may look modest. But once you step on board, you enter one of the most advanced freshwater research platforms in the world.

Since June 2022, we have organised 26 public visits and welcomed more than 700 people aboard LéXPLORE. Each time, the same reaction: surprise, curiosity, and excitement. Because visiting this floating research station is not a passive tour, it is a live scientific experience.

On our way to a visit to LéXPLORE © Natacha Pasche, 2025 – EPFL

Here, science happens in real time.

You will see instruments that measure the lake’s temperature from the surface to 110 meters deep, sensors that record oxygen and currents day and night, and systems that transmit data continuously to researchers. You will discover how these measurements help us understand how climate change is reshaping the ecosystem, not in theory, but here and now.

But what makes the visit truly special is the direct connection with the living lake.

During the tour, we conduct live demonstrations. Fresh water samples are brought on deck. Under the microscope, the invisible world suddenly appears: zooplankton drifting and pulsing, tiny organisms that form the base of the food web. Seeing them alive, collected just minutes earlier beneath your feet, changes the way you look at the lake forever.

Zooplankton from the lake, Daphnia sp. © Guillaume Cunillera, 2022 – EPFL

LéXPLORE is the result of a unique collaboration between EPFL, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva, Eawag and CARRTEL. It brings together physicists, biologists, chemists and climate scientists around a single question: how is Lake Geneva changing, and what does that mean for its future?

During the visit, we also explain results from major ongoing research projects. One striking example is the “missing winter mixing.” In a healthy winter, surface waters cool, sink, and mix with deep waters, bringing oxygen down and nutrients up. This natural overturn is essential for aquatic life. Yet since 2012, full mixing has not occurred. As a consequence, deep waters are progressively losing oxygen. Nutrients remain trapped at depth, fish experience increasing stress, and the entire food web becomes imbalanced.

Standing beside the temperature sensor chain that reaches the lakebed makes this invisible physical process suddenly tangible. What sounds abstract becomes concrete, measurable, and deeply real.

Standing on the platform, surrounded by open water and scientific instruments quietly collecting data 24/7, you feel both the fragility and the resilience of this ecosystem. You also understand something essential: this lake is not static. It is alive, dynamic, and responding to pressures we can measure and act upon.

A visit to LéXPLORE is an opportunity to go beyond headlines and truly grasp what is happening beneath the surface. It is a moment of dialogue with researchers, of discovery, and often of inspiration.

The lake belongs to all of us. Come and see how we study it and why it matters.

📅 Upcoming public visits are now open for registration. Join us on the water.

https://lexplore.info/book-a-public-visit-discover-lexplore-platform/