Once, it would have been easy to think of Antarctica as a frozen land of nothingness. A place of interest only to explorers testing their tolerance for misery. A continent covered by ice so thick as to be eternal, changing slowly if at all.
Today, we know that pretty much none of that is true.
As humans heat the planet by burning fossil fuels, the ice at the bottom of the Earth is changing in ways that are anything but slow, with consequences that are anything but distant. Antarctica’s melting glaciers are already pushing up sea levels worldwide, worsening the damage from floods and storm surges. The speed and extent of the melting could determine the fate of coastal communities worldwide, home to hundreds of millions of people.
That’s why a ship carrying nearly 40 researchers from four continents left port in New Zealand on Saturday. After crossing the southern seas, the scientists will spend a month at the edge of the Antarctic ice. And I’ll be traveling with them.
Journey to the Melting Continent
The New York Times is joining an expedition by sea to Antarctica’s fastest-thinning glaciers. Follow along here. And watch our videos here.
For all that has changed about the frozen continent, it remains a diabolically hard place to work. Traveling there is slow and occasionally harrowing. The window to get in, do research and get out is short. The weather sets harsh limits on what can be accomplished day to day and hour to hour.
And yet, people are still drawn there. Only now, the attraction of going is not just to prove that we can. It’s to unlock the inner workings of Earth’s most unearthly place, a place so alien and extreme that it seems almost beyond our comprehension.
Our destination on this trip is a remote bay whose waters wash up against the fastest-melting ice on the continent. The journey by sea is a week and a half each way, longer than it takes to fly to the moon.
The area’s largest glacier, the Thwaites, is known by an apocalyptic nickname, the “Doomsday Glacier.” Thwaites is the size of Florida, more than a mile thick in places, and shedding 50 billion tons of ice a year. If it melted away entirely, it would raise average sea levels by 2 feet.
But, like a cork in a bottle, Thwaites holds back the vast icy plateau that scientists call the West Antarctic ice sheet. The greater peril would be if Thwaites collapsed and caused the broader ice sheet to melt away, adding another 10 to 15 feet to sea-level rise.
The idea is not far-fetched. Geological evidence tells us it might have happened before, some 120,000 years ago. While it would take centuries for all the West Antarctic ice to melt away again, Thwaites is already disintegrating fast enough that the next big milestone in its collapse is expected not decades from now, but years.
“Thwaites has really broken up in front of our eyes,” said Doug Benn, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Daggers in the Ice
Like all the best adventures, this expedition has goals but no guarantees. One team of scientists, intending to study the warming waters under Thwaites, will attempt to drill through a half-mile of the glacier’s ice and install instruments in the seawater below. Other teams will lower equipment from helicopters into the ice-strewn seas and venture onto ice floes to place buoys. Another group will attach sensors to seals, which can dive and gather data in waters that are inaccessible to ships.
Those are the plans, at least. “There will be a Plan A through F,” said Chris Pierce, a glaciologist at Montana State University whose team hopes to use airborne radar to look inside Thwaites’s fractured ice, like X-ray on a broken arm.
It’s not just bad weather that could spoil things. At the edges of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the glaciers are changing so quickly that what researchers think is important can turn out to be the opposite once they arrive.
Or vice versa.
Consider Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University, who in 2020 collected data in the center of Thwaites’s eastern ice shelf. Dr. Pettit chose the spot mainly because it was accessible, not because the ice seemed to be doing anything dramatic. She would soon learn otherwise.
Glaciers, which are really just enormous piles of ice, may seem inert. In fact, they are always in motion, pulled by gravity down toward sea level and flattening out, like a heap of molasses.
The warming seawater beneath Thwaites’s eastern ice shelf, which is part of its floating edge, had been eroding the ice and weakening it from below. But as Dr. Pettit was preparing for her visit, the surface looked smooth and intact. “It was kind of like the boring part of Thwaites,” she said.
Only when she and her colleagues reached the shelf and started collecting measurements with GPS sensors did they realize the ice’s movement was accelerating. From satellites they saw huge, dagger-shaped gashes opening up, some of which were as deep as the Empire State Building is tall.
Now, Dr. Pettit and others expect the shelf to break apart entirely in the next few years, becoming a mélange of giant icebergs. Once that happens, the ice upstream could start moving quickly to fill the void, Dr. Pettit said. “They are connected in ways that we don’t fully understand,” she said.
Being There
The scientists’ home for the next two months, the Araon, is a 360-foot-long icebreaker operated by the Korea Polar Research Institute. As researchers grew concerned about Thwaites a decade ago, the United States and Britain mounted a seven-year, $50 million research campaign involving more than 100 researchers. Many of them sailed to Thwaites aboard the Araon or an American icebreaker, the Nathaniel B. Palmer.
This year, though, the Palmer was decommissioned, a victim of President Trump’s budget cuts. That has left the United States without a dedicated Antarctic research ship and leaves South Korea as the only nation with long-term plans to sail to Thwaites regularly.
The American ship’s retirement will have a “huge impact” on Antarctic research, said Won Sang Lee, a polar scientist with the Korean institute who is leading this season’s expedition. The voyages of the Araon and the Palmer complemented each other, Dr. Lee said. The scientists aboard focused on different topics in different locations and shared data.
“We want to find another partner to work together, but it’s really, really difficult to make that happen,” Dr. Lee said.
On this expedition, one target is a daring sequel of sorts. A team of 10 hopes to camp for weeks on the ice and use hot water to drill the half-mile-deep hole to the ocean underneath. Down this hole will go instruments that sit in the water for one to two years, measuring the warm currents that are melting the glacier from below.
Several members of the team did something similar on Thwaites’s eastern shelf in 2020. They went back to the glacier in 2022 on the Araon, hoping to drill at another spot. But thick sea ice blocked the ship from sailing close enough to allow the researchers to leave the ship and venture onto the glacier.
This time, if the scientists succeed, theirs would be the first ocean mooring ever installed under Thwaites’s fast-moving core, said Peter Davis, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey and member of the team. The data collected would provide invaluable visibility into this crucial and all but inaccessible corner of the planet.
Still, plenty could go wrong.
The glacier’s surface is dangerously crevassed, so the first thing the researchers must do is survey the ice to find a safe spot to set up camp. The hole they bore will be scarcely a foot wide, so the instruments they lower into it could get stuck to the walls and ripped off the cable.
The ice of Thwaites’s core is moving toward the ocean at about 30 feet a day. So once the mooring is installed, the ice could drag it and its cable along the seafloor for more than 4 miles over two years, potentially damaging the instruments.
The data gathered will be transmitted from a 10-foot-tall tower on the glacier’s surface. That is, unless a crevasse opens up and swallows the tower whole.
Happy Accidents
All that effort, all that travel, just for a shot at learning something new. Scientists do it only because the stakes for the planet — for all of us — are so high.
Still, not all surprises on an Antarctic voyage are bad. There are also grand revelations, happy twists of fate, moments of awe and delight. For the next eight weeks, I’ll be bringing you those, too.
Take that 2022 expedition, the one that failed to reach Thwaites. The Araon and the Palmer went instead to a nearby ice shelf, the Dotson, and scientists sent a robot into the waters underneath. What it saw astonished them.
Inscribed on the undersides of the ice were huge, enigmatic shapes: swirls and scoops and teardrops, some of them hundreds of feet across, like immense works of land art, only upside down.
“It was just so different from anything I’d ever imagined,” said Karen Heywood, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia. The patterns highlight the complex interactions between warm currents and melting glaciers, Dr. Heywood said, fast and furious in some places, less so elsewhere.
Other discoveries have been made with the help of teammates who don’t take orders as well as robots.
One team on this expedition plans to spend several days searching for seals to tag with sensors. Their preference is for Weddell seals, beloved for their soulful eyes and gentle smile. They might also try tagging southern elephant seals, bellowing behemoths whose males have the lumpy, swollen nose of a boxer.
Once they’ve been tagged, the animals will go on diving and basking and leading normal seal lives, all while capturing measurements of ocean temperature and salinity that will be transmitted by satellite to the scientists.
The data that comes in won’t be as random as you might think, said Lars Boehme, an ecologist at the University of St. Andrews. The seals “go where the food is,” he said. “And very often, that’s a place where, in terms of the environment and oceanography, things are happening.”
Sometimes, the animals highlight locations that scientists hadn’t even realized were significant, Dr. Boehme added.
In a place as full of mysteries as Antarctica, it helps, in other words, to be open to the unexpected.
Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times.
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