It was February 2019 and Elizabeth Rush couldn't sleep. It was really early in the morning and I felt like a kid on Christmas who just kept waking up and is like, is it Christmas yet? No, it wasn't Christmas. Elizabeth was aboard a special ship called an icebreaker at the western edge of Antarctica. Sometime between four or five in the morning I woke up. You know, there's not really night in Antarctica at this time of year, but it's a little bit darker at this time of day. After a month at sea, she was about to witness something nobody had ever seen up close. The leading edge of an absolutely enormous wall of ice. Thwaites Glacier. The only thing that I have as a visual reference point is that it sort of looks like the wall in Game of Thrones. So, you know, this wall of ice that's probably two times higher than the ship. The ship's like six stories high. And I was really in awe of it. Folks who'd spent more time along ice shelves than I had noticed things that I wouldn't have noticed. They said like, it looks mangled or gnarly. It looks sick. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. And I'm Justine Paradis. And today we are sharing a behind-the-scenes look at an international expedition to an unexplored part of this world. She told me, it's going to be easier for us to get help to folks on the space station than it is for us to get help to you while you're at Thwaites. And we'll get to know a glacier which could reshape every coast on this planet. The stakes are, they range from the personal to the financial to like the global. Stay tuned. Visit MedExpress.co.uk Now, Claus, we... The Holland and Barrett Wellness Day sales live! Hey! Up to 55% off thousands of wellness faves. Oh, right. It ends 16th of June. Right, go go to Holland and Barrett. OK, Claus, let's wrap this up. Thank you, Body Fill S. Shot now. Up to 55% off selected lines, exclusions and T's and C's apply. It's sale runs 13th to the 16th of June. Get the new Fix and Fall tariff from British Gas, where prices can only slide down. If energy prices climb up, no worries, you'll be fixed for two years. But if later the market falls, so will your tariff. A win-win, sorted automatically by us. Price Cap, taken care of. Fix your prices today. Search British Gas, Fix and Fall. T's and C's eligibility and limitations apply. Price review based on the off-gen price cap after 12 months. See BritishGas.co.uk slash verify for more. This is that side in. I'm Nate Hedgie. And I'm Justine Paradis. Elizabeth Rush is a writer. We've actually had her on the show before. And her path to Antarctica started long before she ever stepped on a boat. I had been writing about sea level rise in particular for, I don't know, over half a decade. And I wanted to like see the source. In 2018, she got a once in a lifetime offer. A spot on an international research vessel headed to a part of Antarctica that no one had ever been to before. Thwaites. They're deploying an icebreaker this year and there's one birth remaining. And I recommended it be given to you. It was a dream come true to be invited, truly. To accept, Elizabeth had to put her life on pause. She and her partner had been planning to start a family, but... I found out once I was accepted that pregnant people aren't allowed to deploy to the ice. Because basically it would be too dangerous. I was 35 at the time. And so, you know, that's like the number that's batted around is like, oh, your fertility starts to plummet in your mid to late 30s. So I felt sort of like squeezed by this mandate to not get pregnant before going. But I also was kind of curious, like, I'm going to carry that desire with me onto this boat. And how is this mission going to shape that desire? It felt very risky, to be honest. This trip was special, even for a mission to Antarctica. You may have heard of Thwaites' nickname, the doomsday glacier. It's called that because if it collapses, the implications for global sea level rise will be profound. It is just absolutely gigantic. It's the size of Florida. It's the size of Great Britain. And it alone contains enough ice to raise global sea levels two feet. It also, we think, acts as a kind of cork to the entirety of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains, you know, upwards of 10 feet of global sea level rise. But despite how important it is, scientists had very little firsthand knowledge about Thwaites. Most of it was based on satellite imagery and data from other glaciers. How hard is it to get to Thwaites? Well, I'll say this again. We were the first human beings to ever get there and no one has returned since. So it's extremely hard. Getting to Thwaites, it's kind of like getting to the summit of Mount Everest, in the sense that there's a short window of time when the weather is good enough to risk it, just four to six weeks. In most years, the sea around the Thwaites is frozen over, essentially all year. So the year that we went, there was a really exceptional pocket of unfrozen water directly in front of the glaciers' calving edge. They were setting off during the Antarctic summer, when there's 24 hours of daylight at the South Pole. But sea ice conditions can change quickly in the Southern Ocean. And best case scenario, it would take weeks to get to Thwaites. My program officer said a lot of interesting things in the prep for this mission. She told me, it's going to be easier for us to get help to folks on the space station than it is for us to get help to you while you're at Thwaites. Elizabeth's home for the next eight weeks, her space station, if you will, it was called the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer. It's a type of ship called an icebreaker. This is a serious boat, about the length of a football field and six stories high. And one of the first things she noticed about it was its distinctive color scheme. The hull is the color of a traffic cone, and the rest is painted a kind of egg yolk yellow. One of the Brits looked at me and said, like, what's with the paint job? Was orange on sale or something? Like, it's a goofy color, this boat. But I also wondered, like, if it's bright orange so that, like, people could notice it against the landscape. It certainly stands out. So months after that first call, Elizabeth found herself on a pier in Punta Arenas, Chile, getting ready to board. Before they left port, she and her crewmates had been handed their government-issued cold weather gear. I thought it was really hilarious. Like, the Swedish gear was so sexy. It was like these, like, full-body, like, black Starship Trooper outfits that I was, like, very jealous of. The Brits were very utilitarian. I felt like they regularly looked like car mechanics, and I was like, you know, they all had sort of, like, matching, like, embroidered insignias, and they were a little team. And the US gear was so scrappy, it was hilarious. I felt like sort of a mixture of a rubber ducky slash, like, lobster fisher person. Most scientific expeditions like this have a particular research focus, like, sea ice extent, maybe, or deep ocean currents. But because the weights is so important, and because of how difficult and expensive it is to get there, the plan was to gather as much direct observational data as they could. There were a few different science teams on board. The rock team, the sediment team, the submarine team, even an elephant-sealed team. All told, there were 57 people on the ship. About half scientists, half crew. Among the scientists, there was solid gender parity. About half women, half men. Among crew, a few were women, and the two able-bodied sailors on board hailed from the Philippines. Filipinos are famous sailors, but that also has to do with economic need and want, working on long-range vessels is a lucrative profession for many in the Philippines. We had two black men on board, both of them were cooks. And, you know, I think you can kind of see that those people who hailed from families who had access to centuries of economic resources off the boat tended to be the ones conducting the science, and those who didn't tended to be working in support of the scientists. Conditions in the Southern Ocean are, of course, extreme. The water is so cold that if you fell overboard without protection, you'd stiffen and freeze in just minutes. So we left from Punta Arenas, which is the southern tip of Chile. We sailed out the Strait of Magellan, and within a couple days we were crossing the Drake Passage, which is the wildest, reliably wildest ocean passage in the world. There's an ocean current that wraps around the entire continent of Antarctica, and the Drake Passage is essentially its narrowest choke point. We encountered 25-foot seas that basically caused the ship to roll, like rolling back and forth for days on end. So most of my shipmates got really sick. Did you not get sick? I did not get sick. I have never been super prone to seasickness. In fact, Elizabeth liked to go to the ship's small gym. Someone had brought along Insanity Max 30 workout videos, and they were made even more interesting by the rocking of the ship. You could be doing jumping jacks, and the ship would be rolling beneath you, and so you would get way more airtime in your jumping jack. It was great fun, actually. As exciting as it was to be on this unique first-of-its-kind mission, much of the day-to-day experience was actually not as thrilling as you might imagine. Many of the scientists and crew would tell me the true challenge of Antarctic fieldwork is the boredom challenge, because you have these extremely long transits, in which you're not doing the science. People passed the time in pretty unremarkable ways. They watched movies, they did crossword puzzles, they read pulpy romance novels. There was one aspect of life on the icebreaker, which was particularly important for the morale of all souls on board. Food. So there are four meals a day on the boat. 7 a.m., noon, 5 or 5.30, and then something called midnight rations, which is at midnight. And those four meals, like, ground your day. One of the cooks said something to me that I thought was brilliant. He was like, you know, we aim to put out good food for meals a day, because as soon as you're putting crappy food on the line, like, the morale goes down. People look forward to meals, and we'd get excited, and like, you know, I remember Sam and Wellington was like, wow, this is a big day. One of our cooks came from New Orleans, he did a king cake, and we had like a Mardi Gras celebration in the galley. Beyond the card games and the high seas, there are beautiful moments too. Whales. A deli penguin sliding off ice floes, flippers a kimbo, the ocean the same, yet different every day, and the eerie blue of that first iceberg, and then the hundreds that followed. They'd been at sea for three weeks, and the Palmer was getting close. Maybe 12 hours from Thwaites. The excitement was palpable. And then... And... And then the ship turned around. Then we were all gathered in the computer lab and sort of told this news. One of our shipmates was in great physical danger, and that we had to get this person to help as soon as possible. The details were mostly kept under wraps, and it was only months after the voyage was over that Elizabeth got the full story. A crew member was pregnant. This was obviously unexpected, because remember, pregnant people weren't allowed on the mission. But in this case, she and her husband were both crew members on board. Elizabeth interviewed her about the Medevac much later, and they think the child was probably conceived the day before they left port. But now, just hours away from the ice, this person was experiencing extreme abdominal pain. There were concerns that the pregnancy was ectopic, a life-threatening condition. And quite frankly, if that had been the case, she would have died on our boat. Of course, the crew's health is very important. But getting to the weights, I know everyone wants that. Like, how much did that set the... Was there a risk of not getting to weights because of this? Yeah, there was. I mean, it was... The sea ice was open, and everyone was like, oh, my God, we could be there right now. And at the same time, it was like, but we have to get our shipmates safe. Yeah, there was just concern that the sea ice would close while we were on this medical evacuation, that we wouldn't get to go back. And that would have been kind of devastating. But also, you know, it's a decision you make to value human life. Time slowed down. People watched horror films, taught each other to play bridge. Elizabeth organized the International Amundsen Sea Ping Pong Tournament. Late one night after a card game, a humpback whale spouted in the fog. Every day that passed was a day that they couldn't spend doing research on the glacier. They finally made it to a remote British base where the woman and her husband were evacuated. And then they turned around again, back towards the ice. Back towards the weights. The ice was frozen. We arrive at the edge of the ice in just a minute. Passwords can be really tough to remember. I mean, like, was it my mom's name plus the year she was born? Or was it that high school teacher plus the year I was born? And then a question mark or an exclamation mark? I can't remember. That's why if I'm shopping for something online and I get to the very end of the checkout and it asks me to log in, I know I'm going to take a minute or two. But sometimes you'll see a purple button at the top of the payment options, and that button makes everything easier. No need to put in a password, no need to get your wallet, find your card. You can check out with one click. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Want to get a fun colored bag from Cotopaxi? Click that purple button. Need a new workout tee from Gymshark? Click that purple button. And if you're a brand just getting started, Shopify helps you get the word out with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And if you ever get stuck, Shopify's always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. The less carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shoppay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com. Go to Shopify.com. That's Shopify.com. Summer always changes how I get dressed. I want pieces that feel lighter and more breathable, things that are easy, right, but still feel put together. And that's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high-quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Think breathable linen and soft organic cotton. Well-made basics, but without the luxury markup. It is that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still effortless. Quince European linen pants and shirts are the perfect warm weather upgrade to add to your rotation, starting at just $34. Now, up where I am in Alaska, the summer never gets quite hot. So I have this blue chore coat from Quince that I wear. It is awesome. It fits great. It's perfect for those cooler summer nights down south. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to Quince.com. For free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E. For free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com. If you've got a partner or a best friend, you've probably learned that it's not a great idea to unload all of your emotional baggage on them. I mean, it's just unfair. But it is still important to talk about that stuff, which is why a lot of us see therapists. But finding one is hard, especially one that's going to take your insurance. Rula does things different. They partner with over 100 insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session. Rula partners with a network of over 15,000 therapists and psychiatrists nationwide, enabling you to find your personalized solution and the right therapist for you based on your needs, preferences, and state requirements. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit Rula.com. That's R-U-L-A. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. Welcome back to Outside In. I am Nate Hedgie here with Justine Paradis, picking up Elizabeth Rush's journey to Thwaites. When Elizabeth knew that she'd be writing about Antarctica, her first stop was the library to see what else had been written about this place. I took out a bunch of books that first day and I brought this huge stack of them back to my office. And it was only once I got to my office that I realized that, like, I don't know, of the two dozen books I took out, two were written by women, none were written by a person of color. That was my first clue. Almost every single book about Antarctica really retells, like, the same six events. These are classic, if cliched, stories of male explorers battling the elements. Amundsen's Conquest of the Pole. Scott trying to beat Amundsen, dying in the attempt. Shackleton and the epic story of the endurance. And so, like, a couple months into my research, I started to grow really bored. The language and the metaphors are metaphors of sexual dominance. So it's like, Antarctica's broad white bosom draws men towards it. And her impenetrable interior is the ultimate prize. And so my boredom kind of gave way to a bit of rage. I'm not gonna lie. These stories of male heroism felt so incomplete. Because actually, no one goes to Antarctica on their own. Beyond the 57 people on the Palmer, scientists, cooks, crew, technicians and sailors, there were families at home, support teams. This is a huge community that had contributed to make this journey possible. And Elizabeth realized, when she wrote about Antarctica, about this voyage, she could include all of that. The morning the icebreaker arrived at Thwaites, she got to see that collaboration in action. It was like a switch flipped, and suddenly it was a scientific overdrive. And, yeah, it was just like, it became very no BS. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We're making use of literally every minute we have at this point. No more ping pong. Everyone on board started working 12-hour shifts, like 12 hours on, 12 hours off. No more horror movies. Oh gosh, you know, the stakes are, they range from the personal to the financial to like the global. This is career making science for a lot of the people on board. You only get one shot. And for them at a personal level, the data is stuff that they're going to work on for years afterwards. So like, it's a really big and important deal. The actual science being done was pretty fascinating. The sediment team was gathering cores from the sea floor, which would then be stored in an archive and studied by scientists all over the world. And meanwhile, the ship itself is like constantly running sonar. So you're constantly trying to get, generate a picture of the sea floor. That's like happening 24 hours a day in the background. And they enlisted some of the locals to help get readings under the ice shelf. Seals. We also were sending scientists onto ice flows so that they could sedate Waddell seals and epoxy transponders to their foreheads so that these Waddell seals could take temperature readings of the water, salinity readings of the water. The reason they did this is because while the ship could only be there in person for a few weeks, the Waddell seals live there year round, even when the ice is impenetrable to human vessels. One of the most ambitious projects led by the Swedish team was a submarine, technically an autonomous underwater vehicle, that they deployed underneath the ice shelf. This was a very tricky, expensive and delicate maneuver. They could potentially have lost to the state of the art sub beneath the ice. And they sent it out and got it back, twice. So what did we find out? I'll try to, in the most accessible language I can, talk about the biggest findings from our mission. So that submarine that we sent under the ice shelf came back with really detailed images of the sea floor that illustrated hundreds of corrugation ridges that looked kind of like tractor tracks on the sea floor. These ridges are a kind of record of how thweights has moved over the past couple centuries. Each ridge was once the location of what's called the grounding line, the place where that floating part of the ice shelf of thweights connects to the land. Those ridges tell a story that thweights could collapse faster than anything we've ever seen. They tell us that the grounding line at thweights has retreated at rates two to three times faster than humans have ever observed, which is really significant. Another major finding came from a team of scientists doing some Antarctic archaeology. And this comes from the penguin bones that we were able to exhume from these remote island chains at no time since the last glacial maximum has the weights regenerated. So we have no reason to believe that it will start growing in the near future. The science frenzy at this part of thweights lasted less than a week. By the end of their time at the edge of the glacier, the Antarctic night was already noticeably longer. And then the ship turned back, back across the Drake Passage, back to Chile. What I remember actually from returning after being gone for 54 days was that I could smell like earth. I could smell a certain sort of like fecundity. The ice has very little of that. After one last evening ashore, drinking wine in Punto Arenas, the ship's community dispersed to universities, to labs all across the world, and they carried with them sediment cores and water samples, ancient penguin bones and data. Thweights is nicknamed the doomsday glacier. A complete collapse could lead to a staggering amount of sea level rise, the kind of thing that will transform cities across the world. Elizabeth had just witnessed thweights in its ongoing disintegration firsthand, and now she was returning home and again picking up her plans to try to start a family, which is something a lot of people are grappling with, that question. Having children as human cause climate change transforms the world they're living in, including Antarctica, with what kind of planet and society our children will be living in and on. But Elizabeth thinks thweights is nickname misses something vital. I don't love the nickname, but I am aware that it's catchy and a lot of people use it. Accelerated sea level rise doesn't have to mean apocalypse. It depends on how human beings and human society responds to this shift. And even if we're talking multiple feet in a century, there are ways to transform our human society so that that is not nearly as catastrophic as it might otherwise be. So I feel like doomsday glacier kind of steals from us the possibility of being transformed and not just for the worse by this glacier. So that's why I don't love the name. And so, later the same year that she traveled to Antarctica, Elizabeth got pregnant. I think having a child means you have to commit to believing that the future can be better than the past, but it's not just a belief, you also have to commit to being part of that change. Like if you're going to bring them here, you have to be able to look them in the eye and say, I brought you here. And here's what I'm doing to make the future livable for you, livable for all matter of life on this planet. Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening, Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth. We first aired this story on the podcast in 2024. Earlier this year, as part of other deep budget cuts to federally funded science programs, the Trump administration announced they were halting operation of the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, that ship that took Elizabeth to Thwaites. The Palmer is currently the only US Antarctic icebreaker dedicated to scientific research. If the funding cuts remain in place, there will be zero. Elizabeth took beautiful pictures of the voyage to Thwaites, some of which she graciously shared with us. So we will be posting a few on our Instagram and we'll be linking to some of the science that came out of this voyage and other expeditions like it. You can find links to all that and more in the show notes and on our website, outsideenradio.org. Also, these otherworldly sounds you're hearing are not the flourishes of a DJ, but the vocalizations of our Waddell Seal allies in Antarctica, which are made available to download as ringtones at waddellsealscience.com. This episode was produced by Justine Paradis with help from me, Nate Hedgie. It was edited by Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Marina Hanky, Jessica Hunt, and Felix Poon. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of podcasts. Music in this episode came from BluDOT Sessions, a band whose entire name is just consonants. So I'm going to try it, Nick Turn. Sometimes Y, Flyin', Silver Maple, Yantarian, Chris Zabriski, and Oye. Outside In is a production of NHPR. From artificial intelligence to the gig economy to global volatility, the economy is changing at a dizzying pace. Enter the Managing the Future of Work podcast, the chart-topping and critically acclaimed podcast from Harvard Business School, hosted by me, Bill Kerr, and by managing the Future of Work project co-chair, Joe Fuller. The show explores technology, trends, demographic changes, the rise, the care economy, and many other forces transforming the landscape of work. We'll highlight the insights of business leaders, technologists, and experts like Business Round Tables, Kristin Silberg on Corporate Workforce Strategy, and Khan Academy founder, Sal Khan on AI, Education, and the Future of Work. With more than 2.5 million downloads and close to 300 episodes, there is something for everyone. Follow HBS Managing the Future of Work on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. The Founder Mindset, the new podcast from Harvard Business School Foundry, hosted by me, Reza Satchu. As a leading educator in entrepreneurship, I've built multiple high-profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures. And with The Founder Mindset, I'm sharing those lessons with you by sitting down with world-class entrepreneurs, including Witherspoon, O'Leary, And Earl, Plus Tim Ferriss, and many more, to break down exactly how they commit, decide, and build for impact. These aren't surface-level interviews. Each episode, I challenge my guests to revisit their toughest moments, their boldest decisions, and the mindset that carried them through. Follow The Founder Mindset wherever you get your podcasts.
