The Sunday Story: The Quickening

You may have heard of Thwaites Glacier before, Rolling Stone called it the Doomsday Glacier. It's a massive body of ice in Antarctica that currently acts like a cork in a wine bottle, holding back the rest of the Western Antarctic ice sheet. But if it melts so much that it begins to break apart into the ocean, it could destabilize the entire basin. That could ultimately lead to a 10-foot rise in sea levels, drowning coastal communities across the globe.

Four years ago, the ice in the Southern Ocean that surrounds Thwaites Glacier loosened up, allowing an ice-breaking research vessel to go to a part of the glacier that had been inaccessible before the calving edge, where the glacier meets the sea, fifty-seven people, including climate scientists, support technicians, crew and a handful of journalists, made the 60-day journey. Elizabeth Rush was among them as a fellow with the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers program. Her latest book, The Quickening Creation and Community At the Ends of the Earth, is about her journey to Thwaites and also towards motherhood. She spoke with producer Ariana Garib-Lee about her trip and what the ice has to teach us about life on shore.

And I really focused on the lived experience of those coping with and adapting to, and being fundamentally changed by rising seas. And one thing that many of those people had to learn to live with, and that I had to learn to live with. As I kind of covered this beat was profound uncertainty, like, are sea levels going to rise three feet or six feet by century's end? We really don't know. And you have to make decisions now about what to do today without knowing that future outcome. So that uncertainty I had to grow familiar with and sort of comfortable inside.

And then I read this article about Thwaites that basically said, we have literally almost no information from this place. And that there is this possibility of a much more significant, much more accelerated rate of sea level rise because of what could happen in West Antarctica. And so it just became sort of like, Okay? I want to see the source of the thing that's fundamentally driving so much change and transformation firsthand, like I want to know it in my body. I'm such an experiential learner and so I definitely went into this experience thinking I might see this glacier fall apart. And something fundamental will have to shift in me as a result.

But there was also a bunch of reading and research, too. So what'd you find, and how did that shape the way that you wanted to write about Antarctica?

It's Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole, so he's the first person to get there. You get Mawson's shooting and eating his sled dogs, you get Shackleton's miraculous return after his wooden ship is like crushed in the ice. And he and his men spend over a year trying to get back to civilization. And some of them cross the drake's passage in a dinghy. I'm not trying to say those are not incredible feats, but they're just a really particular kind of story. And it's kind of like the only story or one of the main stories that we think about when we think about Antarctica. And I just grew really bored by it, and I was also frustrated.

Like a lot of the language that's used to describe the ice has a deep kind of vein of sexual violence. So, you know, Antarctica's broad, white bosom draws men towards it. Her impenetrable interior is the ultimate prize. And I would say that, like, boredom gave way to rage at some level. And I, you know, being invited to go on this mission meant that I had to delay my own plans or desire to get pregnant. Pregnant. People are not allowed to deploy on scientific missions to the Ice. And so, you know, somehow that fact was with me from the very beginning. And I had this instinct that I wanted to write a different kind of book about Antarctica. And I thought, You know what if I include that desire in this book?

What if I think about motherhood and Antarctica in the same sentence, which is, you know, never done? And so that was like, I think, one of the driving impulses behind this book from the very start. And it's very much like a response to all of that literature that I was telling you about.

Vermont is underwater. Like, is it still okay to have a child? We can literally kind of see the early impacts of climate change around us. And the future that that child will live in the fabric of it is yet to be determined. Like, what human beings do in the next two decades will fundamentally shape our planet towards the end of this century. And yet we have to make a decision today about if we want to have kids. Without having the knowledge of what the future is going to look like, it's a really hard choice to make, and it kind of splits both ways.

Like, is my child? Is their presence going to have a negative impact on the planet? and will the planet have a negative impact on my child?

Everybody has one. It's the amount of CO2 your day-to-day activities emit into the atmosphere. And then it's like, go to our website, you can calculate yours. Before that moment, you can literally look at language usage.

People are not talking about carbon footprints. And now today it's this ubiquitous term, we all use it, we all think about it. And at a psychological level, it's shifting blame away from corporate entities and onto individuals.

It's saying you have the power to address climate change by changing your consumer decisions, and that that is your most powerful lever, your lever for combating the climate crisis. Should be about whether I buy a Prius or a Jetta, it should be about whether or not you consume meat or are vegetarian. And we often see in those carbon calculators, the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have one fewer child.

They calculate it as 60 tons of CO2 kept in the ground. And I just want to call out the fact that I think it's a categorical error. To say. Choosing to have a child or not have a child is the same kind of decision as choosing a Prius or a Jetta, they're not the same kinds of decisions at all. One is, I think of it as a spiritual decision, I think of it as a decision about who I want to be as a human being, and the other is a consumer choice.

So I don't think those are the same thing to begin with. And yet, I had spent a lot of time feeling guilty as an environmentalist for wanting to have a kid. And as I found out that these carbon calculators and their ubiquity was a result of funds pumped into advertising through fossil fuel channels. I lost my feeling of guilt for wanting to have a child. I set it aside. I was like, Oh, that's something that has been conditioned in me by these companies who don't want to stop extracting fossil fuels from the Earth.

It's a conditioned response, and I grew really angry that they had taught me to feel guilty for wanting to become a mom. I grew also a bit sad at the years. I had lost feeling that emotion and feeling kind of isolated inside of that emotion. And it was also deeply liberating to be like, Okay, I can let that go.

That felt like truly being open to that and going on. This trip felt like the truest space that I could, like, step into the journey in, and it felt absolutely terrifying. Like, I'm going to take these two desires that I have to see a glacier have, and to bring a child into the world. And they are pulling me in opposite directions, and I'm going to see what happens when I like, honor them at the same time, fully aware that, like, one might destroy the other. And yet I was like, Okay, this is like, this is the only way I can actually write this story.

So I'm going to have to be really open to having no freaking clue what's going to happen.

And she told me, You know, point blank. It's easier for us to get help to folks who are at the space station than it is for us to get help to you when you're at this glacier. Oh my gosh, yeah, so you know what did 60 days on this boat feel like? The thing that struck me most profoundly was that, you know, we took off from Punta Arenas in Chile. And it took us like 11 days to cross the Drake's passage and kind of start to nose into the ice to the Amundsen Sea.

And I was just like, I've never spent 11 days getting anywhere in my life. And you know, during that time, we just didn't see any other human beings. There was no Amazon to deliver something if, like, you didn't have what you needed. All of the support that was going to be available to us was on that boat, right?

So, like, we were our doctors, we were the cooks, we were the medics, we were the engineers and the electricians. And you know, if you slip and you break your ankle, someone on that boat's going to have to reset your ankle. And then you're like, a liability to everyone on the cruise.

And so I was curious why you made that choice.

I guess, you know, our storytelling tends to focus on individuals. And sort of raise up one singular perspective of an event. And that just literally sort of sweeps everyone else who's adjacent to that event off the stage. Climate change is not a singular problem, with a singular solution that can be solved by an equation of some, you know, supremely brilliant person. And so I think, like, societally, I think, because we're so steeped in those stories of individual genius. I think we sort of believe that that singular solution is around the corner. It just hasn't been dreamt up yet. And that fundamentally undermines our ability to actually address the problem, which is at a scale vastly different.

We are all contributing to it in an ongoing way, and there's no one thing that's going to like, fix it right. And so it is a really hard story to tell and we don't have a lot of models.

Outside the Thwaites, gray margin wobbles in the gloaming, we wind alongside it, entering small coves and rounding on promontories. Our pace slow to hold this precarious line, the ice face soft as dunes, the night's new hint of darkness gives way to the bruised light of dawn. And many others appear to watch. What each of the 56 scientists and crew members aboard have been working towards for weeks, for years, and in some cases, for decades, come into sharp focus.

We don't talk when someone wants to say something. They whisper as though we're in a giant, roofless cathedral. Finally, we gaze upon thwaites, which until mere weeks ago, was unreachable for the first time since humans started keeping track. And, most likely, in thousands of years, the sea has thawed enough for a ship to sail right up to the glacier's ice front.

Allie I've been working on this region for one-third of my life. And I was worried that Thwaites would be a letdown after seeing so many other parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet. But this, this is different, and not in a good way. Some bits look totally mashed up.

Bastion. The face is mangled and gnarly joey. It looks like the ice was moving in really abrupt and violent ways, like something tumbling got frozen in space.

At this point in the trip, the most important science kind of gets underway like this was, in many ways, the point of the mission to get there. What are the scientists actually doing?

So we're talking, you know, a couple hundred meters deep, so we're cruising, we're this tiny boat cruising alongside this massive chunk of ice. And the ship's sonar equipment is on, and we're literally recording the ocean floor depth.

We're trying to gauge the depth of the troughs that are feeding warm water under the weights, we're also trying to gauge the depth of the ice front. Because if we have that information, that means that we'll be able to use it to safely send a submarine under the ice shelf. To begin to record the most important information we need from this mission, which is, what's the temperature of the water beneath the ice? how are the currents moving beneath the ice? What does the ice shelf look like if you are in the ocean and you're looking up at it from underneath? So what are the patterns of melting on the underside of the ice shelf?

And so that information that we gather the first day really makes it possible for us to send a submarine under the ice later on in that week.

And that turned out to be a lot scarier. Can you explain what happened there?

And it was, to my eye, incredibly beautiful and like, picturesque, and I genuinely didn't think that much about it. And I maybe did an interview or two, went to lunch, and when I came out of lunch, I went into the computer lab to transcribe interviews. And there was the chief scientist. And he was sort of compulsively clicking back and forth between two aerial satellite images of our work area.

And these are the first images that have come on board in over a week. We have next to no internet. So this whole week we've kind of had no information about what's happening like in the world at large, nor in the bay around us, other than what we can see. And he's looking at these two images, and in one, the weights ice shelf where we are looks like this relatively sturdy thing.

It's like a big slab of ice, and in the next one, it looks like someone took a hammer to that ice and shattered it into hundreds of pieces.

And I just get goosebumps, and I suddenly understand that, like, what I was looking at that morning.

Was a collapse of the ice shelf right in front of us? And Rob and I are kind of like trying to piece it together. He's like it was sturdy. It was like this in the day we arrived, and now it's this other thing.

And he said to me, it looks as big as the Larson B collapse, which is one of the largest examples of ice shelf collapse that we have in sort of recorded human history. It's a point in time where an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island just disintegrates over the span of a month.

And it's, you know, we capture it in the same way through aerial satellite imagery. So as soon as we recognize that a big chunk of the Waits western ice shelf is literally falling apart all around us, the order goes to the captain, like, we need to leave now. Because these are massive icebergs that are, you know, drifting out into sea. And you know, if you know Titanic and you're on a boat, the one thing you want to do is avoid icebergs, right?

So that's it, like, we flee the study area that afternoon, never to return. We go to the eastern edge of the Waits afterwards and we would spend a couple of days there. Then we would go to Pine Island Glacier, which is adjacent to the waits, we'd spend a couple of days there.

We would return to a couple of remote island chains and then, literally, like, the ocean really starts to freeze over all around us. And the chief scientist and the captain make a decision to leave early. Because I can still remember him saying, like, the western threshold is closing and we need to get out of here. So, you know, there's concern.

Oh gosh. We wake up for a couple of days and at first the ocean is sort of covered in this like icy mat. The next couple of days, the ocean is covered in these. Like bizarre, white, Amoeba-like pancakes. And then the next day I wake up and we're, like, suddenly in much thicker flow. And it would take us a couple of days to actually get out of the Amundsen Sea.

Um, and in fact, even though the glacier was moving at a rate that is exceptional in geologic history. It was impossible for me to see its speed, even though I was like, right in front of it. Hmm. And I realized sort of upon return that it was really hubristic of me to think that I could go somewhere that I had never been had no real relationship with. Other than a kind of, like, hypothetical one in my head. And like, recognize it, see it, call out its actions and understand them, and return home. Um, you know, there are lots of different cultures on the planet that live alongside ice and that recognize the animacy of the ice. And they have these really incredible stories where, you know, glaciers eat people as retribution. Or, um, they're life-giving and mothering in their, you know, seasonal release of meltwater. And I had to recognize that those are stories that rise up out of people and places that have deep, ongoing, intergenerational relationships with those glaciers.

And I had no such relationship. Um, so, I think, at some level, what that attuned me to as a mother is that I really want my son to be able to recognize the movements and the, uh, animacy of the more than human world. And if he's going to be able to do that, he's going to be able to do that in his backyard, for instance, I think of a more like, realistic way to talk about it is to just say, you know, he and I bike along the Narragansett Bay all the time. And instead of talking to him about, like, look at the bay, look at the trees.

I say stuff like the trees are waving to you, like the bay is greeting you. And I'm trying to just teach him to not always tell the story or imagine, you know, nature in relationship to him. But that it is its own thing. And it is, um, acting and alive and changing.

This episode was produced by Abby Wendell and Ariana Gareb Lee, with help from Henry Hottie. It was edited by Liana Simstrom. Maggie Luthar was our audio engineer. The Sunday story team includes Jenny Schmidt, Justine Yan and Andrew Mambo. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer.

Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week until then, have a great rest of your weekend.