Together with collegues, Bas Altena works on enhancing our understanding of Earth's climate through the study of glaciers and its internal and external processes. In his research he makes use of vast amounts of satellite imagery collected over high mountainranges and the Arctic. These imagery stem from current cubesats, or come from already some decades old satellite archives. The automatic detection and extraction of geometric information of glacier surfaces is his specialty. With these elevation and displacement data it is possible to get a better understanding of the reaction of the cryosphere to contemporary climate.

These geometric information can also be of use to record concurrent and swift Earth surface processes. This is another avenue of the research portofolio of Bas, where surface ruptures, river ice break-up and uppersurface water flow are researched.