What Antarctica’s Melting Glaciers Taught Me About Becoming a Mother

By Elizabeth Rush

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The wind gallops through the Strait of Magellan, picks up my ponytail and whips it against my face. Dozens of imperial shags vie for space on the crowded county pier. The bright-eyed birds squawk and strut. I pass them, then ascend the gangplank to board the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, the research icebreaker that will be my home for the next 52 days. I walk down the 01 deck, past two men talking about the potent sedatives that they planned to pack into blow darts, which they will later shoot into the thick blubber of female elephant seals.

This federally funded scientific mission is bound for the Thwaites Glacier. Thwaites sits in an extremely remote corner of Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, a place so cold that the majority of the year the sea surface solidifies. The window for working in the Amundsen is extremely small, four to six weeks at best. When the ocean starts to ice over again, the Palmer will have to head home, and the seals—if the men are successful—will send back all different kinds of data about the temperature, salinity, and density of the water that is working its way under the glacier, eating away at it from below.

Thwaites is known by a terrifying nickname: the Doomsday Glacier. That's because it alone contains two feet of potential sea level rise, and were it to disintegrate wholly, it could destabilize the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which could cause global sea levels to jump 10 feet or more. But because no one has ever before been to Thwaites's calving edge–the place where it discharges ice into the sea–many of our predictions about how it will behave are just that: predictions. Scientific models married to our increasing fear.

But I don't know this on that first morning. That first morning I am just a writer embarking on another reporting trip. I have kissed my husband goodbye, have drunk my last pint of beer, have called my own parents to tell them how much I love them. There is so much I don't know about what will happen. Will I see Thwaites calve? And if so, what will that do to my own desire to bring a human being into this evermore precarious world?

As I walk past the scheming scientists, I catch the contours of a conversation that echoes the kind of hazing rituals fraternities are famous for, reminding me that I will be one of but a handful of women working on this boat the length of a football pitch. When one friend heard that I would deploy to Thwaites on an icebreaker, she suggested taking self-defense classes; another wanted to know just how many other women would be with me on the boat. "It will be easier for us to send help to someone at the space station than it will for us to get help to you," my Program Officer at the National Science Foundation had warned me. What kind of help? I had wondered.

When one friend heard that I would deploy to Thwaites on an icebreaker, she suggested taking self-defense classes

Before leaving port, I gather with the rest of the members of the expedition in a mustard yellow warehouse to receive our ECWs, or extreme cold weather kits.

"Zippers break," some bearded guy says as he hands me an orange duffel bag stuffed with dozens of articles of government-issued outerwear, many of them duplicates. Where we are going there are no stores, no Amazon deliveries, no ways of replacing something that fails. If it breaks, we’ve got to mend it or hope that we brought along a suitable backup.

The oldest woman in the group leans over and whispers in my ear, "Try everything on to make sure it fits." Then she disappears into the communal changing room, which is really just a couple pieces of plywood tacked together. I follow her inside, pull a well-worn pair of work pants the color of pond scum from my bag. "Nothing like a pair of Carhartts to remind you that you have an ass and most men don't," I say to the women around me. Tasha Snow, the media coordinator, is already halfway through her pile. When she steps into a pair of rain pants and pulls out the bib, I laugh. It appears as if two of her could fit inside.

The first person to see Antarctica did so just over two hundred years ago; for most of the short span of time between then and today, women were all but forbidden from the ice. In the clapboard dressing room, I wondered whether the government hoped, even if only in a sideways manner, that our bodies would disappear beneath the bright orange "float coats" and PVC bibs they issued. Our unisex "uniforms" were meant to keep us safe, but from what?

The next evening, I head to the Bridge to watch the ship set sail. I expect the captain to ring a bell or blow a horn, or for someone to smash a bottle of champagne on the bow. Instead the thrusters turn on, a few lines are tossed, and our contact with South America is no more. The Palmer slides out from her parking spot and steams east, through the Strait of Magellan. I stand there, on the bridge wings, for a long time, hands clenching the metal railing, cold pulsing into my palms. I have no idea of whatever it is I have gotten myself into. On the back deck over a dozen people have gathered to watch the ship leave port. Seeing them, my stomach drops: These strangers and I are sailing toward Antarctica together now. We are all we’ve got.

As a writer, I’ve made a name for myself working in places that many would call remote—I’ve walked the frayed fringes of the Louisiana bayou, ridden trains with women smuggling saris from India into Bangladesh; I’ve even paddled a canoe through the brackish streams that separate one decomposing mound of trash from another at what was once the world's largest landfill. Some call me fearless. But they are wrong. My body is a barometer, always trying to divine what is coming. "I’ve got good instincts," I often say.

But I also know that sometimes, perhaps even more than I would like to admit, what I have been taught to fear and what I ought to fear are not one in the same. A slender green snake recently crossed my path, and I flinched from fright. I have absorbed a certain type of story about the threat serpents pose to people, the one in which they cause us to fall from grace. And that story ripples through my body, turns me tentative, whenever something slithers before me. I am anxious during those early days of the mission; acutely aware of just how vulnerable I am to the ice and to others onboard. But there are also larger, more amorphous fears coursing through me. At the cold nadir of the planet, where no one before has ever gone, we suspect that a glacier the size of Florida is coming undone.

I am anxious during those early days of the mission; acutely aware of just how vulnerable I am to the ice and to others onboard.

One morning, about six days into our transit to our first field site, Rick Wiemken, the chief mate, tells me that the Palmer has broken through an invisible barrier during the night—the place where the cold water that swirls around the continent sinks beneath the less dense, warmer water from the north. Like a piston in a pump, this simple exchange drives ocean circulation the world over. Then Rick adds, "I’ve got something for you." There it is, at 66° south: my very first iceberg.

Outside the temperature is noticeably colder, the sea fog cleared, the wind all but gone. I grab hold of the railing and take a few tentative steps on the catwalk that surrounds the bridge. Sixty feet below, the dusky ocean undulates like a big sheet of silk. My stomach drops. A few more steps, and I reach a small, triangular steel deck and sit down.

The lonesome berg rides low in the water. Like whipped meringue piped into a lopsided point, the whole thing lists to the right. Its closest side is guttered and blue, the top dove gray. My eyes hold on to the ice, though I don't know what to do with it exactly, this scraggly, unorthodox thing. A few big rollers come through and throw themselves against the berg, spray lofting into the air. It is hard to say how high the mist reaches–40 or 50 feet?–because there is nothing else around to serve as a reference point.

For the next couple of hours, my shipmates and I walk from one side of the deck to the other, leaning over railings, flinging our attention outward. Together we watch as pieces of the last continent sail away from the glaciers that calved them into our warming oceans. A subtle shift: My awe and concern are, in this moment, shared.

Once we finally arrive at Thwaites Glacier, nearly a month after we set sail, all that matters is data. The scientists begin to work 12-hour shifts: 12 hours on, 12 hours off. No one knows for how long. A week? Perhaps two? We will keep up this grueling rhythm until the sea ice locks us out. Seals are tagged, salt water sampled, we even deploy a submarine beneath Thwaites's floating ice shelf.

One morning I walk over to the Dry Lab and find Rebecca Totten, a paleoclimatologist, crouched over the end of a Kasten core, a three-meter-long metal shaft full to the brim with mud sucked up from the seafloor directly in front of Thwaites. Thanks to this seemingly mundane bit of dirt, our understanding of the glacier will increase, and exponentially.

"Maybe you could help me by holding the sample bags open and rinsing the tools?" Rachel Clark, a PhD student, says. This is her first time in Antarctica, her first time spending months on a research vessel. In the beginning, Rachel seemed deeply shy. But over the last couple of weeks, the timid girl has become someone else entirely: wide-eyed and attentive, irreverent, and seemingly at home in the world. Someone with big clumps of clay caught in her hay-colored hair.

I clean the plastic spoons and spatulas between samples. Then I hold a small bag open over the core as Rachel fills it with dirt. Together we work towards the core's terminus, a task that takes nearly two hours. Our movements take on a certain rhythm: scoop, rinse, repeat. My body recognizes the tempo; it's similar to how I feel washing food scraps off of dinner plates back home. What you do once, you do again and again and again—a monotonous task that takes on the sheen of something important. The way changing diapers or packing lunches is the love that a child feasts upon to grow.

Below the rumblings of the Palmer's twin Caterpillar engines and the Lauryn Hill record we are playing over the speakers, a piece of what was once part of Thwaites scrapes against the hull. It drags down the length of the ship with metallic pings and odd echoes, then it's gone.

Months later, after Thwaites enters an unprecedented period of collapse and our research expedition flees north, after we cross back over the Drake Passage and return to dry land, after the extraordinary community that coalesced on the boat around a shared set of concerns breaks apart, after the thousands of data points we gathered begin to make their way into scientific papers, increasing our understanding of Thwaites's past and present, and making our models of its future more accurate—after all that I become pregnant.

During my first birth class, the instructor begins by saying, "Birth is a dynamic process." She inches forward into a center split. "One that requires both planning and flexibility, a willingness to respond to the various challenges that arise along the way." Then she asks us to brainstorm a list of things that will help us feel that we have what we need to survive.

Her question makes me think back to how I had thought being ready for Antarctica meant finding rain pants the right size or reading up on the history. But it wasn't this preparation that made it possible for me to look straight at a disassembling glacier without losing sight of my desire to bring a human being into this beautiful, broken world. Sitting on a yoga bolster, in the half-lit studio I am struck by the familiarity of the sensation—the sense of being perched on the edge of yet another impossible-to-fathom journey.

We fear climate change because our systems of support are worn and frayed, and we are unsure of whether they will hold up under increasing duress. But on the boat I helped other people, and they helped me. On the boat we tried to listen to what one, seemingly remote glacier is saying, not just about how high seas will rise but also about what has already been lost. On the boat our shared labor gave us something extraordinary, something that seems to have gone missing as of late: trust in each other.

Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, which is out in August and from which this essay is adapted.

All photos courtesy of the author.