Its adjoining ice shelf-a large floating expanse of ice, which extends from the glacier out over the water-acts like a cork in a wine bottle, holding much of the rest of the glacier in place. There are bigger glaciers elsewhere in Antarctica, and they are also showing signs of weakness, but Thwaites is especially concerning. Thwaites, which is named for a late, eminent geologist, is on the southern side of the thumb, where it meets the hand. The continent is shaped like a hitchhiker’s fist, its scraggly thumb pointing west. “Antarctica occasionally lets you pull something off,” he told me. Greenbaum’s style of adventure is less romantic than world-weary. Weather on Thwaites is notoriously hostile, and, because dense cloud cover makes satellite reconnaissance virtually impossible, we wouldn’t be able to identify promising fissures until we were flying over the ice. We weren’t sure we could repeat this feat. We had successfully placed sensors in the water during our first expedition, on the eastern side of the continent, throwing them from the back of a refurbished cargo plane from the Second World War. We’d be hurling torpedo-shaped probes from a helicopter into cracks in the ice, with the aim of studying the warm ocean water that is melting Thwaites from below. For the second time, I would be working alongside Jamin Greenbaum, a forty-two-year-old scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego. There’s no room for passive observers on the most remote expeditions, and so, on that trip and this one, I’d signed on as a field-research associate, sponsored by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation, an Earth-science nonprofit. I had been “on the ice,” as Antarctic explorers say, once before, in 2019, while researching a book. They would have a month at Thwaites to conduct their respective research projects before the return trip began. Our expedition was led by the Korea Polar Research Institute, which had brought some forty researchers from around the world to the Araon.
We would spend a week or so sailing from Christchurch to the edge of Antarctica, then break through the pack ice of the Amundsen Sea, before arriving at Thwaites Glacier-one of the fastest-retreating on the continent. In the heat, ice was a little hard to picture, let alone icebreaking. It was January 3rd, summer in New Zealand. Its hull was painted a cheerful persimmon color, and its bow was conspicuously higher than the rest of the ship, with a curved shape suggesting that icebreakers don’t so much carve through ice as climb and crush, climb and crush.
The largest icebreakers are more than five hundred feet long, but the Araon was only the length of a football field I wondered how it would handle the waves of the Southern Ocean, and how it would fare against the thick sea ice that guards the last wilderness on Earth. I first saw our icebreaker, the RV Araon, when we were due to leave for Antarctica.
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