Read an Excerpt
Who knows when this all got started? When we became so tangled up in each other, in ice, in obsessing with endings already in motion and what it means to make a little life while the junk drawers overflow, and the jellyfish heap up on the shore, and the pollinator plants just keep blooming, even deep into October, long after the monarchs ought to be gone? What do we make of all that? What do we make amid all that? Each of us begins in our own way. And yet each of us begins the same.
The year I go to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is also the year I decide to try to grow a human being inside of my body. It is the year of becoming two: me and you. The year we all get onto that boat, my shipmates and I, the year we sail past 73° south to the untouched edge of Thwaites, is also just another year in which the ice lets go, a little more this time. Let’s agree to call it a year––like the Year of Magical Thinking or the Year of Living Dangerously––though let’s also agree that it may not coincide with anything that resembles a year on the calendar. It will not start and stop on a certain day, and there will not be 365 of anything. Instead time will flow sideways, the way floodwaters cover the lowest land first, and it will unspool quick as a metal cable lowering a scientific instrument down to the very bottom of the Amundsen Sea.
On our last night on solid earth, many of us sleep in a hotel called Dreams. Everything we do anticipates what we will soon be without. Some call the children they are leaving behind. Some call credit card companies, to set up automatic payments. And some head to the Colonial for a couple of drinks. One person runs along Route 9 to stretch her legs, while another runs to the market to purchase deodorant and a couple empanadas. I go to the steam room just above the hotel’s casino. Then I go to the bar around the corner for my last pint, where I eye every person who enters, wondering if we will sail to Antarctica together. In the morning, I drink a glass of honeydew juice, followed by a glass of raspberry juice. I’m thinking: When am I going to drink fresh juice again? And, more importantly: Is this my last chance to be alone?
From my table at the breakfast buffet, I can see the Nathaniel B. Palmer tied to the pier. The research vessel looks like a winter slipper with the heel facing forward. The low stern flares into a wide bow with a relatively flat rake, so the boat can ride up on top of the sea ice we will soon encounter, forcing it to break. The Palmer’s hull appears as orange as the inside of a papaya, its superstructure egg-yolk yellow. The Ice Tower, a boxy room with windows on all sides, sits at the very top, a kind of crow’s nest for cold weather. Just beneath it: the bridge, where the officer on watch will oversee ship operations every single minute of every single day for the next nine weeks or more. Later, I will stand in that room and ask Captain Brandon how much the Palmer weighs and he will tell me 10,752,000 pounds. Yet I wouldn’t call the ship large. It’s roughly the length of a football field, a distance most humans can cross in under a minute without breaking a sweat. I squint through the hotel’s smudged window, sip my second cup of coffee, and realize that I know nothing about whatever it is that I’ve gotten myself into.
Nine months earlier, I received a cryptic missive from Valentine Kass, my program officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF). It read: An interesting opportunity has come up. Call me in the morning. A strong wind blew all night, stripping the cherry blossoms from the trees. Valentine didn’t wait for my response; instead she rang first thing to tell me that she had spent the previous day in a planning meeting for a five-year program to study Antarctica’s most important and least understood glacier, Thwaites.
“This year they’re deploying an icebreaker to investigate. There’s one berth remaining, and I recommended it be given to you,” Valentine said. Then she asked what was the longest I’d ever been on a boat.
“Five days,” I told her, confident.
“Do you think you’re up for sixty?”
“Sure,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly.
“Where you’d be going, it’s incredibly isolated.” Valentine paused, as if waiting for me to signal comprehension. “For instance, it’s easier to send help to the space station than it is for us to get help to you, if you go. The Brits run Rothera, the nearest base, and it’s a four-day steam from the project site if the sea ice cooperates.”
“I understand,” I said, though I didn’t understand anything, not really.
I had been writing about climate change’s early impacts on vulnerable coastal communities for nearly a decade. During that time, I visited with hundreds of flood survivors, many of whom had lost family members and homes. I listened to their stories so that I might learn from them—and better communicate—how to navigate this time of profound transformation. That there was considerable variability in the current sea level–rise models was something I had come to accept. Would there be three feet of rise or six by century’s end? No one knew, and I, like those I interviewed, had to learn to live with this uncertainty.
But then I read an article about Thwaites and became uncomfortable again. If Antarctica is going to lose a lot of ice this century, it will likely come from Thwaites. That’s because the glacier rests below sea level, exposing its underside to warm-water incursions that are causing rapid melting from beneath. Thwaites alone contains over two feet of potential sea level rise, and were it to wholly disintegrate, it could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, causing global sea levels to jump ten feet or more. In terms of the fate of our coastal communities, this particular glacier is the biggest wild card, the largest known unknown, the pile of coins that could tip the scales one way or another. Will Miami even exist in one hundred years? Thwaites will decide.
At least that is what many scientists think, which is also why Rolling Stone dubbed Thwaites the “Doomsday Glacier” a couple years back. But no one has ever before been to Thwaites’s calving edge—the place where the glacier discharges ice into the sea—so many of our ideas about how it will behave are a mixture of science and speculation, out-of-date modeling married to increasing fear. The more we learn about Thwaites, the more profoundly we understand that many of our predictions about the speed of sea level rise are extremely tenuous, based primarily on physical processes that human beings have already observed. It is possible that at the cold nadir of the planet, in a place that no one has ever visited, let alone cataloged in the methodical way that science demands, one of the world’s largest glaciers is stepping outside of the script we imagined for it, defying even our most detailed projections of what is to come.
The possibility both haunted and intrigued me, so much so that I applied to the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers program with the strange hope of seeing some of this transformation firsthand. I wanted to stand alongside that massive glacier, wanted to witness freshly formed bergs dropping down into the ocean like stones, so that I might know in my body what my mind still struggled to grasp: Antarctica’s going to pieces has the power to rewrite all the maps.
