After a 12-day journey across the southern seas, the nearly 40 scientists aboard the icebreaker Araon on Wednesday reached Antarctica’s fastest-melting glacier, the Thwaites. An ambitious campaign to study the ice by air, under sea and with boots on the frozen surface is now underway.
The voyage from New Zealand was mostly smooth, at least until Monday, when the ship entered an exceptionally dense area of the sea ice that encircles the Antarctic continent.
For hour after grinding hour, the crew guided the ship through and around the icy sheets, regularly doubling back when the route ahead became impassable. All around was a wild, lunar plain of immobilized icebergs and snow-laden ice floes, sculpted by the winds into peaks and ridges.
The ship listed and shook as it ran up against the ice and broke open new seams of dark water. From the lower decks, it sounded like being inside a washing machine: whooshing, roaring, cascading.
Only around midnight on Wednesday did the thickest ice start to clear. The ship’s captain, Kim Gwang-heon, who had not slept in more than 30 hours, could relax at last.
“We bring all possible tools for predicting the conditions, but it doesn’t always go as planned,” he said. “It’s our duty to be humble and try our best.”
The collection of international scientists aboard the Araon, a vessel operated by the Korea Polar Research Institute, will spend more than a month investigating Thwaites. One team plans to fly a radar system over it to examine the innards of the fracturing ice. Another will use a helicopter to lower a remote-controlled rig into narrow rifts in the glacier’s floating ice, where the device will gather measurements in waters no ship could sail.
The Thwaites Glacier is a mass of ice as big as Florida, and if it melted away entirely, it could raise global sea levels by two feet. Warm ocean currents are eroding the end of the glacier that sits on the sea. As this floating ice thins and weakens, the ice on land is able to move more quickly toward the ocean, where it melts and adds to sea-level rise around the world.
If this goes on for too long, the glacier could become unstable, causing ice loss to accelerate, scientists say. And, in the worst case, Thwaites’s undoing could act like a cork being pulled from a bottle, causing the neighboring glaciers that make up the West Antarctic ice sheet to disintegrate as well. That could add 10 to 15 feet to sea-level rise over the course of several centuries.
The most daring project of this season’s expedition will take a team of 10 scientists, engineers and guides to Thwaites’s windswept surface, where they will camp for a month. They will attempt to use hot water to drill a half-mile-deep hole through the ice and place instruments in the cavity of seawater underneath.
This vital zone is where warm currents are eating away at Thwaites from below. The team hopes its instruments will remain in the murky depths for one to two years, allowing the researchers to monitor in real time how the water is moving and changing in one of the most unreachable places on Earth.
The drilling project should “go a long way” toward helping scientists predict how quickly Thwaites will melt, said Peter Davis, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey and member of the drilling team.
Only with ample data on the movement of warm water under the glacier can scientists establish exactly where and how quickly it is gnawing away at the ice.
Much, however, will depend on the same fickle factors that have bedeviled Antarctic exploration for more than a century.
On Wednesday afternoon, under a draping of cottony gray clouds, scientific work began with the collection of oceanographic data in the seas around Thwaites. For the 10-person drilling team, critical days still lie ahead.
Because there are no docks, the only way to reach the glacier from the ship is by helicopter. The Araon’s two helicopters will need to make many trips to ferry the team members and all their equipment to the planned drilling site. The closer the ship is to the site, the shorter these flights will be, allowing the work to start sooner.
There’s a spot where the Araon could anchor that is about 30 kilometers, or 19 miles, from the drilling site, which is on Thwaites’s fast-flowing core. To reach this location, the ship would have to navigate a narrow passage that is partly clogged by sea ice.
The plan for now is to make a first attempt early Thursday. (The ship is on Mountain Standard Time.) If Captain Kim decides the ice is too thick or the crossing too risky, the ship could turn around and try again later.
Still, the entire drilling operation requires four weeks, so if it doesn’t begin by Tuesday, there won’t be enough time to finish before the ship has to head back to New Zealand around Feb. 10, said Won Sang Lee, the expedition’s chief scientist.
There’s another element, as there always is in Antarctica. Even if the Araon reaches the team’s desired anchoring spot, the helicopters would fly only if weather allowed. Right now, the forecast for Thwaites shows rough skies until Saturday.
Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times.
The post The Icebreaker Reaches the Thwaites Glacier, and the Science Begins appeared first on New York Times.
