The Unfathomable Heart
A version of this essay originally appeared in Confluence, The Dark Mountain Project’s twenty-first book on April 15, 2022
‘How does it feel to become a drop of water, and then to re-enter, to dissolve back into the whole?’
Ingrid Horrocks in her essay “Dissolving Genre: Toward Finding New Ways to Write About the World” in Lithub
The PM-3A Nuclear Reactor, the only one humans have ever built in Antarctica, was supposed to ‘revolutionize’ human access to the continent through abundant and clean energy. In 1972, after operating only ten years, the US Navy shut down ‘Nukey Poo’ because of its ‘numerous malfunctions’, a ‘suspected crack’ in its containment vessel, and the financial cost of investigation and repair. A leak would harm the environment and break the Antarctic Treaty, which forbids the dumping of nuclear waste in Antarctica, this 34-million-year-old winter, ‘the Ice’, as we call it. The truth is that Nukey Poo earned its nickname because of the frequency and volume of leaks from its containment vessel. The removal plan disclosed that three cracks had already been welded shut, but not before allowing nuclear waste to seep into the ground. The US Navy relocated 12,200 tons of radioactive earth to the United States. By 1979, decommissioning was complete. What remains of Nukey Poo are these two wooden platforms, still pounded into the side of Observation Hill, a steep lava dome covered in scales of scree. Large metal sheets –canvases for wind and snow to splotches of rust and scratch and nick paint – are still affixed to the floors of two decaying platforms. I’ve been putzing between them, surprised by the amount of debris still littering the ground after 42 years. This morning’s sallow light highlights the junk. Rusted screws, bolts, nuts, washers and wires. Bits of insulation. String. Rubber. Unidentifiable corroded metal scraps. Even bits of porcelain. All mingling with volcanic rock and dirt.
Observation Hill pimples the edge of Ross Island. From here, I can view a thin line: the meeting of the Ross Ice Shelf – a Spain-sized glacier and the world’s largest floating body of ice – and the frozen Ross Sea. This juncture is the furthest south the open ocean exists. Three white wind turbines belonging to Scott Base, our neighboring station, crown a nearby hill to the left. Below, at the base of Ob Hill, a scattered cluster of buildings make up McMurdo, the American research station where I work and the largest on the continent. Enormous fuel tanks – at least ten – are its most striking structures. Three letters – ‘NSF’ – emblazon the top of the closest tank. The National Science Foundation now runs the US Antarctic Program instead of the military. I don’t typically visit the nuclear plant rubble on Ob Hill to think about energy consumption or environmental catastrophe. I come to this hill to watch whales, clouds, birds, light. A smoking volcano. Distant glacier-drizzled indigo mountains. Mostly I witness the water. The sea’s surface – frozen or liquid – changes like a face. I love watching its subtleties, how its personality comes through as crushed ridges of blue-sheened shards arching towards the sky. Or as the rhythmic lapping of waves touching land. Or its evolution from grease ice to pancake ice to a thin crust, thickening into sea ice as the temperature lowers.
Two islands hunker next to each other in the distance, White Island and Black Island, one like a penguin on its belly, the other like a penguin on its back. Between the islands, due south, you’ll find a groomed snow road to the interior of the continent. South of here, beyond the mountains and islands, it’s ice, a flood of ice. Antarctica is home to most of the world’s ice and snow and its highest population of glaciers. But ice is not just ice.
About 1,200 miles from Ob Hill, on the edge of West Antarctica, lives a glacier named Thwaites, a colossus, one of the biggest glaciers in the world, about the size of Great Britain or Florida. Its size is not why we are afraid of Thwaites or why it’s famous. Rolling Stone nicknamed Thwaites ‘the Doomsday Glacier’. A few call Thwaites a monster. Officially, Thwaites the glacier is named after Fredrik T. Thwaites the man, a glaciologist from Wisconsin. I wish I knew what Thwaites the glacier’s real name is, what it calls itself pronounced in the tongue of glaciers.
To us, Thwaites is secretive. We are working to pry its secrets open. I am one of many who are working to support the work of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a robust four-year-long collaboration primarily between British and American research programs. The collective goal is to understand Thwaites and ultimately to predict its ‘death’. The eight research projects have acronyms like GHOST, PROPHET, MELT and TIME. People have journeyed by ice in tractor trains to Thwaites – no small feat. They’ve arrived on the back of the glacier, gliding to a halt on tiny aluminum planes outfitted with skis instead of wheels. They’ve melted hunks of Thwaites, their only source of freshwater, for drinking and cleaning. Thwaites has filled their bellies, their bloodstreams, and their cells. From the surface, researchers have bored holes into Thwaites, lowered instruments and detonated explosives inside of its guts – a large-scale ultrasound – to understand the depths, the insides of their subject. They’ve also arrived by sea, sending robots under the water, underneath its body, to measure. They peer at the crumbling edges of glaciers from boats called icebreakers, whose muscular hulls can crush their way through sea ice: South Korea’s RV Araon; Britain’s HMS Protector, RRS Ernest Shackleton, andRRS Sir David Attenborough; and the US’s RV Nathaniel B Palmer.
From the nuclear ruins I can view McMurdo’s port, Winter Quarters Bay, whose bottom is coated with garbage. When the Palmer, a cheerful-looking orange and yellow research vessel, pulled into this harbor a few years ago, logistics contractors like me – the majority of people in Antarctica and the ones who make scientific research possible – were invited to tour the ship. There’s a maritime romance to it. Tables and chairs bolted to the floors. Porthole windows. Large maps in the captain’s bridge. The namesake of the research vessel is unfortunate. In 1820, Nathaniel B. Palmer, only 21 and already a captain, led one of the first groups of westerners to encounter the continent. Palmer, an American seal hunter, didn’t only see the glaciers curling over the hard ragged edges of the continent. When he saw fur seals and elephant seals, he saw potential profit. So when humans first came here we slaughtered many seals. Whales too – those great supple beings – were systematically hunted to near extinction. Right whales. Sperm whales. Grey whales. Humpbacks. Blues. Fins. Seis. Minkes. In 1925, an Antarctic whaler wrote: ‘The water in which the whales float, and on which we too are riding, is blood red.’ Between 1918 and 1984, humans killed about 1.6 million whales in the Southern Ocean. That combined biomass was equal to the whole of humankind. In 1986, most nations agreed to suspend whale hunting. Right now, western powers are squabbling over harvesting krill, small crimson creatures who travel together in hypnotic red clouds like murmurations of starlings. We mostly turn krill into food for our pets, but also into cosmetics, like anti-aging serums, and pharmaceuticals. Krill’s bodily oils are good for our physical hearts.
Humans have not always approached Antarctica to overharvest, nor were westerners the first people to experience Antarctic waters. Ui-te-Rangiora, an expert ‘wayfinder’ from present-day Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, sailed south and led a group of ancient Polynesians around AD 650. They encountered floating ice and called the area Tai-uka-a-pia, ‘sea foaming like arrowroot’, a fine white powder with which they were familiar. The relationship between the ocean and ancient peoples in Oceania was intimate. Wayfinders knew the languages of clouds, water and stars and navigated with them, being carried from small island to small island by water in the vast Pacific. The art of wayfinding, often taught orally through song, demands all the senses. For wayfinders, attunement to the ocean is attunement to one’s body. The sun, moon and stars guide, but if clouds obscure, there are other signs. Driftwood, seaweed. Subtle shifts in the water’s hue. The kinds and behaviors of birds. The presence, shapes and colors of clouds. Rain and the direction and qualities of wind. Wayfinders decipher the shapes, motions, and direction of water, reading swells, waves, and ripples like script. Ancient peoples employed pigs as wayfinders on their boats, whose keen snouts navigate by the distant smell of atolls. One wayfinding technique – to get the best felt sense of things – is to rest one’s genitals on the bottom of the boat.
Wayfinding technology – knowing the patterns of nature, the language of water – survived western colonialism. In his 1978 book, The Voyaging Stars, David Lewis recounts learning from Kaho, a blind wayfinder who asked his son, Po’oi, where certain stars would appear. Kaho directed Po’oi to steer into a wave so he could taste the spray in his mouth and feel the water on his skin. The blind man then plunged his whole arm in the water to feel its movement, its remembrances. ‘“This is not Tongan water but Fijian,” he announced. “The waves are from Fiji Lau group near Lakemba Island. Let us alter course to the westward.” Next morning they duly sighted Lakemba.’
We are afraid of Thwaites because of what its transformation means for us, our homes and ways of life. Researchers estimate how many billions of tons of its body melt every year and what percentage of annual sea level rise that constitutes. It’s a lot. They say that a key part of Thwaites’s body – its ice shelf, its body part that floats over the ocean – will disintegrate within ten years. They also describe Thwaites’s ice shelf as a ‘cork’ or a ‘dam’ holding back the mass of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, an icescape we call ‘the flat white’. When you step onto its surface, you step onto a solid cloud. The two-miles-thick ice in West Antarctica is a remnant of clouds drifted to Earth, frozen for millennia. In West Antarctica, all appears still. But underfoot, the ancient ice is moving. My lifetime is too short to perceive it. How exhausting it must be for Thwaites to shoulder that bulk, at least 3,200,000 gigatons! Researchers describe Thwaites as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘unstable’, steadying itself by holding onto land under the sea like a cane. They speak of Thwaites ‘losing its grip’. Perhaps Thwaites is letting go.
After the ice shelf disintegrates, researchers predict an ‘ice cliff failure event’ when the rest of Thwaites’s flesh will speed up and leak into the sea. People have calculated how many feet the ocean will rise when Thwaites’s entire body liquefies. Afterwards, when all the West Antarctic glaciers behind follow, the sea level will rise five times that amount. The word ‘collapse’ has been used as a rhetorical catch-all to describe these series of events, ranging from the onset of Thwaites’s ice shelf shattering to the bulk of West Antarctic glaciers circling the drain. As Bethan Davies, a glaciologist, notes: ‘collapse’ is slow. Time scale models give vast ranges for the disintegration of West Antarctica, from hundreds of years to begin to millennia to complete.
A few weeks ago, I strolled atop the surface of the frozen Ross Sea with Marianne, a seismologist and geophysicist awaiting her chance to spend time with Thwaites. Antarctica is not one homogeneous slab, but a kaleidoscope of ice, intertwined frozen bodies moseying towards the sea. To Marianne, topographical maps of Antarctica showing glaciers’ velocities in various colors make the continent look like a human organ. Its currents, its rivers of ice streaming into the sea resemble veins, arteries, aortas. The whole thing an unfathomable heart pumping blood.
Researchers like Marianne are investigating all the factors that are leading to Thwaites’s metamorphosis. The shifting location of the polar vortex – the swirl of air around the continent – is altering wind patterns, driving warmer water towards Thwaites, changing it from below. We describe tidal pumping, one of Thwaites’s natural bodily functions, as problematic – for us. When the tide causes the floating part of its body to rise, the pressure sucks warm water into Thwaites’s ‘grounding zone’, the confluence where its frozen belly, the land and the water meet. The tide goes out, ice lowers, but the warm water is trapped underneath, morphing solid to liquid.
Two years ago at McMurdo, I chatted with Britney, a planetary scientist who designs robots that rove underneath ice. Her ultimate goal is to send a robot to Europa, one of Jupiter’s icy moons, to find life under the water. Her team created Icefin, a small tubular robot, outfitted it with a camera, and sent it to Thwaites’s grounding zone. No human had ever seen a grounding zone before. She showed the intimate footage to anyone at our research station who wanted to see it. It was not what I expected. I’ve heard researchers describe glaciers’ grounding zones as ‘chaotic’. I expected some kind of rot, rubble, a broken edifice. Instead, this site of erosion, this mixture of ice and earth looked serene. Thwaites’s wrinkled underside has distinct layers:
foggy, quartzy ice crystals, then
ice thickly embedded with pebbles and rocks, then
perfectly clear glass with crystallized mud, then
streaky, blue-tinged ice.
What labor these layers must have required! What a relief to not be scraping against the ground anymore. What a balm to rest in the silky sea.
Another highlight – this was when Britney got excited – was revelatory footage of anemones, who bore holes into Thwaites’s perfectly clear ice, not to measure, sample or record but to live. Anemones like little trees taking root. Before this, we only knew anemones to live in rock or sediment, not glacial ice.
When Thwaites calves into icebergs, welcomed by the ocean, it will not have left Antarctica. During winter, when the world hardens, Antarctica becomes pregnant with ice. Seawater freezes to the continent’s hard edges in a jagged wreath doubling its size. This frozen sea ice softens, shattering into ice floes, every spring. But Antarctica’s boundary isn’t these annual frozen fringes. Nor is its boundary perennial glacial ice or land. Antarctica bleeds into open water. Its threshold is fluid, a deep and generative membrane in the Southern Ocean. Antarctica’s boundary is porous.
A 20- to 30-mile-wide hoop of oceanic water – the Antarctic Convergence – encircles the entire continent, flowing unbroken, widening and contracting with the seasons, like the sea ice. Propelled by powerful westerly winds, this halo of water separates two hydrological regions, each with different salinity, density and temperature. In the Convergence, cold Antarctic waters meet and sink underneath the warmer subantarctic waters to the north. These mingling worlds of water upwell a nutrient feast from the seafloor for tiny aquatic creatures, the backbone of the Antarctic food web. The area of the Southern Ocean between the Convergence and Antarctica’s land – where the surface water is frigid – are icebergs’ most comfortable habitat. If icebergs cross the Convergence’s liminal zone north into the warmer world, they melt more quickly.
The Southern Ocean is like an engine, a pump. The Convergence is a feature of the largest current in the ocean – the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, also called the West Wind Drift. This muscular current twists and contorts, surging clockwise around the continent, influencing the circulation of water through the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, even beyond the Equator. Like an air conditioner, the Southern Ocean moderates Earth’s temperature and absorbs and stores vast amounts of carbon – almost half of the excess carbon humans have produced since the Industrial Revolution.
The ocean will continue to pillow Thwaites the glacier as it releases chunks of itself from land, becoming icebergs, which the wind and water will continue to massage and groove and polish into splendid and haunting forms. Thwaites will float counterclockwise for many years, carried by the Antarctic Coastal Current – the East Wind Drift – hugging the continent and moving in the opposite direction of the Convergence. Thwaites the iceberg will dissolve into glittering surface water. The ocean, like land, is layered. If this surface water meanders to the Convergence, it will sink and migrate north as Antarctic Intermediate Water. But if Thwaites as surface water freezes into the sea ice that petals the continent each winter, its route will be more interesting.
The Ice has a long reach. Antarctica creates deep water – ‘bottom water’ – the currents, the sinews, connecting islands and continents. The freezing of the Southern Ocean supplies the deepest parts of the ocean and shapes Earth’s climate. When Antarctica’s sea water coagulates into ice, it expels salt into the remaining water. This extremely salty, cold and dense water sinks, pushing the water that sank before it northward, beginning a long loop. Most of it will crawl north on the floor of the ocean, an underworld, possibly for centuries, before reaching the surface as far north as the North Atlantic. Even at the Equator, this bottom water will still be Antarctic-cold.
When does a glacier die? When it breaks? When it dissolves? When does Thwaites, its molecules, stop being part of Antarctica? Maybe names, nouns, aren’t so meaningful, so sturdy. Upon inspection, they melt.
We call the bottom layer of the ocean, which covers most of Earth’s surface, the abyssopelagic or abyssal zone. Abyss means bottomless. The abyss is a slow world, completely dark. Most of the ocean is abyssal, so Thwaites will have many places to roam and rest, a community of glacial waters to join, many creatures to meet – animals far more harmonious than us. Dwelling in a high pressure and low oxygen environment, they move slowly, glacially, to preserve their energy. Most are bioluminescent. They create their own light.
Maybe the abyssal creatures can hear Thwaites coming. In 1997, researchers listening for volcanic activity in the southern Pacific recorded a strange and powerful noise, then more instances of the rippling, booming sound they called ‘the Bloop’. Theories abounded about what event, what utterance, could cause such a sound. Years later, they figured the Bloop out: an icequake. The bellow of glacial ice heaving itself into the sea.
Thwaites will not be free of us, even in the abyss. Without consenting, it will have to carry microscopic bits of plastic, which the abyssal creatures will eat. They instinctively eat whatever floats in front of them. Thwaites will have to metabolize the acid we add to the ocean, yet will nurture abyssal beings nonetheless.
Like Thwaites, we are migratory creatures, beings whose bodies are mostly water. Eventually, Thwaites the liquid will rise, emerging someplace in the northern hemisphere, perhaps hundreds of years from now. My form will be gone, the Earth will have absorbed my body, its water will have seeped into the ground or leaked into the sky. Thwaites will see what our evolving coastlines look like as it flows, touring our coastal cities.
Thwaites will not stay there. The ocean – like life – is cyclical. Thwaites will return to Antarctic waters. As Circumpolar Deep Water – now warmed and living between the surface and the abyss – Thwaites will migrate back to the Ice, ascending to the surface in a place called the Antarctic Divergence, completing the cycle and replacing the salty water that has sunk, beginning its northward journey. It will be Thwaites’s turn, as ocean, to receive and support icebergs. But this circuit, this homecoming, depends on the freezing pattern of sea ice in Antarctica. An interrupted cycle would affect weather patterns around the world. Who knows where Thwaites may wander?
From here, amid the amber rubble on Observation Hill, I can see a spine of mountains that cradle the driest place on Earth. These ‘Dry Valleys’ have not seen rain for almost 2 million years. Ventifacts – rocks curved and hollowed and curled into fabulous forms by the wind and sand – are the icebergs of these Valleys. A glacier named Taylor lives in one vale, but instead of tumbling into the sea like Thwaites, Taylor appears to bleed from its terminus – its end – in a slow gush named Blood Falls. Taylor’s brine oxidizes, creating its own rust. Antarctic-made ruins. Sometimes it’s a lush splash of red. Other times a darkened umber ooze. The source: a remnant of an ancient ocean trapped beneath Taylor, a 1.5-million-year-old time capsule. The bacteria living in this small body of water have evolved to thrive, to restore themselves, cut off from light and oxygen. They’re an example of what life might have looked like before an oxygenated atmosphere or what we might find on another planet.
People say that where there is water there is life. Kathy, a researcher in the Dry Valleys since 1993, prefers to say even where there is only the potential for water you can also find life. Water harbors many kinds of life, takes many forms. Glaciers, humans, bacteria. Something yet to be. Thousands of miles and many years appear to separate us from Thwaites, yet we are a strange junction, an eventual meeting of waters.