Two Horizons, One Glacier, One Elevator in the Amundsen Sea
From a Korean icebreaker in front of Thwaites, reporting on the night a robot slipped beneath the ice to measure the future of sea level
It is about midnight, which, in this part of the world, at this time of the year, is the golden hour. It was the perfect time to film the deployment of a sophisticated robotic buoy that will help scientists better understand the ebbs, flows, and temperature changes in the Amundsen Sea near the Thwaites glacier. Even though, to my amateur eyes, the water looked relatively clear of sea ice, the veteran crew of the Korean research vessel Araon scrubbed the launch. Too much ice for safety.
David Holland, the NYU climate scientist whom I have been covering for many years, had hoped to deploy one of his robots near the sill in front of Thwaites—a critical underwater ridge that controls how much warm water can reach the glacier’s grounding line. The robot is part of a mooring system: a tethered, buoyancy-driven instrument that will move up and down the water column, measuring temperature, salinity, and current speed day after day for years.
“It’s basically an elevator in the ocean,” Holland once told me. “Now you get the complete picture—from the seafloor to the surface—of what the water is doing.”
This matters because the water here is the real agent of change. Satellites show Thwaites melting faster than any glacier anywhere. Warm ocean currents are to blame. Thwaites is melting tens of meters per year, not centimeters, like its neighbors. But until now, scientists have had almost no direct, long-term measurements of the seawater that’s doing the melting.
Holland will have to deploy his elevator in the water column another day. He took it all in stride. You have to be Gumby flexible in this racket. No biggie. Science here is an up-and-down proposition for sure.
That’s just part of what makes being embedded on this ship so interesting.
This week, I found myself standing in front of the same wall of ice while speaking to two very different audiences, on two very different programs, both called Horizons.
One conversation was with my PBS News colleague William Brangham, the other with Ted Simons for Arizona Public Television.
It’s a strange and wonderful thing to beam a conversation from one of the most remote places on Earth back into living rooms all over the country. The wind rattles the ship’s superstructure. The ice shifts and groans in the distance. And atop a shipping container bolted to the ship, not far from where I am, a small satellite dish connects me to the world and high-definition video. I'm not sure any reporter before me has been able to report so vividly and effortlessly in real time from Antarctica.
[My conversation with Ted Simons of Arizona Public TV is embedded below]
The Araon itself is the through-line of this story. Operated by the Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI), the ship is a floating laboratory—an icebreaker, helicopter base, and science platform rolled into one. On this expedition, KOPRI has graciously invited an international team of glaciologists, oceanographers, engineers, and pilots from institutions like New York University, the British Antarctic Survey, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Their shared goal is simple to say and brutally hard to achieve: understand how warm ocean water is getting under Thwaites and what that means for the future of sea level.
And they also care about sharing this epic science story with the rest of the world. That's why my team and I are here along with the New York Times.
[My conversation with William Brangham of PBS News Horizons is embedded below]
What struck me during both Horizons interviews is how differently this story lands depending on where you’re sitting. From a studio in Phoenix, Thwaites can feel abstract—ice at the end of the world. From the deck of an icebreaker, it feels uncomfortably close. This glacier holds back a vast reservoir of inland ice. If it gives way, the effects won’t stay in Antarctica. They’ll show up in ports, neighborhoods, and coastlines around the globe.
There’s something deeply human about watching this science unfold. These researchers have left families and warm homes to chase data in a place where half of all experiments fail simply because Antarctica decides they will. And yet, tonight, one small robot is now riding the dark water beneath the ice, sending back clues about a system that could shape the future for millions of people.
Two Horizons. One glacier. One elevator in the Amundesen Sea. You can't begin to solve a problem until you understand it.
Excellent coverage. Your clairty and descritption make it easy reading. Reading one line I think of a number of questions and then in the next line, you've answered them.
Thanks.
Your reporting exceeds my expectations by, ahem, miles. I’d always been fascinated by the Antarctic because my father had been a member of Adm. Byrd's Operation Highjump in 1947. But beyond a look at one of the most remarkable and mysterious places on the planet, your reporting gives the world a unique and clear-eyed sense of the importance of Thwaites glacier as a bellwether for the effects of climate change.