Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?

Yesterday, the Nathaniel B. Palmer left Antarctica behind and made the turn toward home. The last science experiments were completed, and the ship headed north, toward Punta Arenas, Chile, where our two-month journey will end. Scientists on board are packing up equipment and writing rough drafts of papers based on discoveries they made during our adventure into uncharted waters around Thwaites glacier. But an almost existential question looms above it all: Did we just witness what amounts to a climate catastrophe playing out in real time?

View from the deck of an ice-strengthened ship
on an expedition cruise to Antarctica, 2013.

On March 3rd, Bastien Queste, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia who is a key member of the science team aboard the ship, got a WhatsApp message from a colleague back in the UK. She had sent him a satellite image of Thwaites glacier and the surrounding region in West Antarctica. At the time, we had just completed our own close encounter with the awesome craggy blue glacier and were only a few miles away, mapping the seabed in front of the glacier with the ship’s sonar device.

On this trip, satellite images have been indispensable in helping scientists track the ever-changing ice in the regions we’ve been exploring. But the map Queste received that morning was different. He noticed dark cracks in parts of the ice shelf, which floats out over the sea like a huge fingernail from the glacier itself. They had not been there before. The ice shelf was clearly starting to break up. Queste’s first thought: “Oh, shit.

Read the story from Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell - “Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?”