A Wild Plan to Avert Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise
The collapse of Antarctica’s ice sheets would be disastrous. A group of scientists has an idea to save them.
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The edge of Greenland’s ice sheet looked like a big lick of sludgy white frosting spilling over a rise of billion-year-old brown rock. Inside the Twin Otter’s cabin, there were five of us: two pilots, a scientist, an engineer, and me. Farther north, we would have needed another seat for a rifle-armed guard. Here, we were told to just look around for polar-bear tracks on our descent. We had taken off from Greenland’s west coast and soon passed over the ice sheet’s lip. Viewed from directly above, the first 10 miles of ice looked wrinkled, like elephant skin. Its folds and creases appeared to be lit blue from within.
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We landed 80 miles into the interior with a swervy skid. Our engineer, a burly Frenchman named Nicolas Bayou, jerked the door open, and an unearthly cold ripped through the cabin. The ice was smoother here. The May sunlight radiated off it like a pure-white aurora. We knew that there were no large crevasses near the landing site. This was a NASA mission. We had orbital reconnaissance. Still, our safety officer had warned us that we could “pop down” into a hidden crack in the ice if we ventured too far from the plane. Bayou appointed himself our Neil Armstrong. He unfolded the ladder, stepped gingerly down its rungs, and set foot on the surface.
Over the next hour and a half, we drilled 15 feet into the mile-thick ice. We fed a long pole topped by a solar-powered GPS receiver into the hole and stood it straight up. In the ensuing days, we were scheduled to set up four identical sites in a long line, the last one near Greenland’s center. Each will help calibrate a $1.5 billion satellite, known as NISAR, that NASA has been building with the Indian Space Research Organisation. After the satellite launches from the Bay of Bengal, its radar will peer down at Earth’s glaciers—even at night, even in stormy weather. Every 12 days, it will generate an exquisitely detailed image of almost the entirety of the cryosphere—all the planet’s ice.
NISAR’s unblinking surveillance is crucial because not even the largest, most immobile-seeming edifices of ice stay in one place. They move, and as the planet warms, their movements are accelerating, and so is their disintegration. Glaciologists have spent decades telling people that ice sheets are hemorrhaging icebergs and meltwater into the ocean at rates without precedent since the advent of scientific records on the subject—and that this is a serious problem, especially for the 40 percent of us who live in low-lying regions near a coastline. The glaciologists have often felt ignored. In recent years, they have begun to bicker, largely behind closed doors, about whether to push a more interventionist approach. Some now think that we should try to control the flow of the planet’s most vulnerable glaciers. They say that with the right technology, we might be able to freeze them in place, stopping their slide into the seas.
The glaciologist Ian Joughin, who leads NISAR’s cryosphere team, invited me to go on the Greenland trip. In March, I visited him at the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington to talk through the mission. It was a rare clear day in Seattle. We could see Mount Rainier, the most glaciated peak in the contiguous United States, floating like a white ghost above the horizon. Joughin explained that nearly all of the Earth’s ice is locked up in the two big sheets near its poles. If by some feat of telekinesis I could have airlifted the glaciers off Rainier’s flanks and mashed them together with every other mountain glacier in the world, the resulting agglomeration would account for less than 1 percent of Earth’s cryosphere. Greenland’s ice sheet accounts for about 13 percent; Antarctica’s accounts for the rest.
Ice may have arrived on Earth only a few hundred million years after the planet formed. At the time, Saturn and Jupiter hadn’t yet settled into their orbits. They were still moving around, jostling icy comets, sending some of them toward the inner solar system. Some scientists believe that thousands of these cosmic snowballs smashed into the Earth. The ice they carried would have vaporized on impact, but later rained down onto the crust, raising the sea levels. At some point, the seas’ polar regions started to freeze, and from these tiny beginnings, the planet’s ice grew. About 2.4 billion years ago, a riot of bacteria began exhaling oxygen en masse, transforming the atmosphere’s methane into molecules that don’t trap much heat. Ice spread outward from the poles, advancing over land and sea without prejudice, possibly all the way to the equator. From space, the Earth would have looked like it was slowly enclosing itself in blue-veined white marble. Since then, ice has retreated and advanced, over and over, largely in accordance with the buildup and dissipation of greenhouse gases in the air.
The history of our current cryosphere began 180 million years ago, when Antarctica—then covered in thick forests filled with ferns and dinosaurs—broke off from the supercontinent Gondwana and started drifting south. Only about 20 million years ago, after it had stabilized at the South Pole and put an ocean between itself and the rest of the hemisphere’s climate, did snow begin stacking up into an ice sheet on its eastern half. The first stub of what would become the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appeared around the same time, but it took longer to grow, and it was more unstable. To glaciologists’ alarm, it is still unstable, and growing more so, today.
Greenland’s ice sheet formed much later than Antarctica’s. When I stepped down onto its flat, white expanse and saw that it extended all the way to the horizon, in every direction, it seemed like a permanent fixture of the planet. But it first appeared about 2.6 million years ago, and, like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, it is fickle. In 2016, the geologist Jason Briner analyzed a rock core that had been hauled up from underneath two miles of ice at the very center of Greenland. He was surprised to find an isotope that forms only when bare rock is struck by the intense radiation that flows through the Milky Way. Scientists had long known that Greenland’s ice sheet was sensitive to climate; its southern half and outer edges had crumbled and melted into the sea during the warm periods between Ice Age glaciations. Briner’s analysis suggested that at some point in the past million years, the sheet had vanished entirely, exposing the underlying bedrock to the electromagnetic violence of the cosmos.
Briner’s work is just one small part of an urgent effort to figure out how quickly the Earth’s ice will disintegrate as the planet warms. Mountain glaciers are already shrinking fast. The ice slabs wedged into the valleys between the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas may burn off entirely before the century’s end. Greenland’s ice sheet is also in imminent danger. It still covers almost all of the island, apart from the coasts, but its outlet glaciers have been sloughing off icebergs at an increasing rate. And from my porthole window in the Twin Otter, I could see slushy aquamarine streams rushing across the ice sheet’s surface, even though it wasn’t yet summer. These two sources together make Greenland the largest current contributor to global sea-level rise, but perhaps not for long. Antarctica is awakening from its deep freeze. Within decades, its dissolution could overtake Greenland’s.
Antarctica’s ice sheet won’t melt away, at least not from the top; air temperatures in the continent’s interior are colder than 40 degrees below zero for much of the year. But melting isn’t the only risk to ice sheets. Because Antarctica is so enormous, the quickening of its iceberg discharge alone would be enough to surpass Greenland’s entire output. East Antarctica may be safe for now. Much of its ice sheet rests on a high plateau. But the story is different in West Antarctica, and especially on Thwaites, the glacier that may well determine its future.
Thwaites covers an area as large as the island of Britain. Its bed has relatively few large obstacles, perfect for a glacier that wants to flow fast. A considerable portion of it sits well below sea level. During the last Ice Age, Thwaites grew monstrously thick, and dug a trough beneath itself as it pushed out along the continental shelf. Today, near its terminus, it rests on bumps and ridges on the seafloor, to which ice attaches, creating resistance and helping to hold the otherwise smooth-flowing glacier back. Glaciologists have long worried that the deep currents of warm water surrounding Antarctica could sneak into the trough underneath it. After Thwaites began shedding ice at an alarming rate, they sent an autonomous submersible to investigate. To their dismay, they saw warm water flowing beneath the glacier, thinning its underside. If that continues, the icy structures that affix Thwaites to the undersea ridges may melt away. The glacier could become a runaway. A big inland portion of it could pour into the sea across a period of decades. The models that most glaciologists use suggest that this could occur sometime in the next several centuries. But the models don’t yet have a long track record. The field’s experts can imagine tail scenarios in which it happens much sooner, perhaps within the lifetime of people reading this today.
The loss of Thwaites would be catastrophic. If it goes, it would likely lead to the loss of much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. That would raise sea levels by up to 10 feet. Even five feet of sea-level rise would erase hundreds of islands from the Earth’s surface, along with the unique cultures and ecologies that have taken root on them. Hundreds of millions of people who live along coasts could be forced to find new homes, with unpredictable geopolitical ripple effects. Rich countries would normally have the capacity—if not the willingness—to help poor ones. But their resources may be strained if the urban grids of New York City, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Shanghai are underwater.
While reporting this story, I talked with more than 20 scientists who study the cryosphere. Many of them burned with impatience. They are no longer content with the traditional scientific role of neutral observation. “I’m not going to be satisfied simply documenting the demise of these environments that I care about,” Brent Minchew, a glaciologist at MIT, told me. Minchew is teaming up with like-minded scientists who want to do something about it. They are designing grand technological interventions that could slow down the cryosphere’s disintegration. Most of the scientists are on the younger side, but the central idea they are working on isn’t. It was dreamed up by a member of the older guard, a 57-year-old glaciologist at UC Santa Cruz named Slawek Tulaczyk.
Before leaving for Greenland, I visited Tulaczyk in Santa Cruz. We met at the university arboretum and walked uphill through the forested campus, pausing only to let two coyotes leave the trail. When we reached the hilltop, we gazed out over the Pacific. Tulaczyk began to explain how its waves had shaped the landscape. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, after an extreme Ice Age glaciation receded, the sea rose by nearly 400 feet, and cut a deep new shoreline into the coast. Erosion had since rounded down one of its cliffs into the hill we had just climbed. I asked Tulaczyk if he thought the sea would creep up here again. He told me that he is not a doomer by nature—he once believed that diplomacy and reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would prevent glaciers from avalanching off West Antarctica. But a few years ago, he lost his faith.
It’s not hard to see why. The global appetite for fossil fuels remains ravenous. As of January, China was planning or actively building more new coal plants than all the plants currently operating in the United States. Each one may burn for more than 40 years. Yes, solar panels are flying off assembly lines worldwide, but grids can’t yet store all the daylight that they absorb. Electric cars are still relatively rare, and container ships run on oil. The planet has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. Each extra degree will destabilize ice sheets further, making them more likely to tumble, rather than slowly flow, into the sea. Tulaczyk doesn’t think that the creaky machinery of global governance is moving quickly enough to stop them. He’s formulating a backup plan.
Tulaczyk first became interested in glaciers as a boy running wild through the countryside of his native Poland. He wondered about the deep history of its forests and fields. He learned that during the Pleistocene, ice sheets had steamrolled down from the North Pole and flattened much of the country. When they retreated, they left lakes behind. (“Picture Wisconsin,” Tulaczyk told me.) After immigrating to the United States, he did his doctoral work in glaciology at the California Institute of Technology under Barclay Kamb, a legendary figure from a more freewheeling age of polar exploration. During the 1990s, Kamb took Tulaczyk on long summer expeditions to tented camps in the remote Antarctic interior. They drilled holes into ice sheets with pressurized hot water. Sometimes they reached more than half a mile down, all the way to the continent. Tulaczyk studied the underlying sediment. He found rock and gravel, but also silts and muds that suggested a liquid layer.
Glaciologists were beginning to understand that underneath the miles-thick Antarctic ice lurks a dark water world as mysterious as the sea that sloshes beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The friction of a glacier’s slide toward the sea combines with heat radiating up from the Earth’s mantle to melt a tiny bit of its underside. Subglacial watersheds channel the meltwater into hidden streams and rivers. Some pool into lakes that eventually discharge as the ice above them moves, and watersheds shift. Satellite-laser scans have recently revealed more than 400 areas across Antarctica that pulsate faintly in time lapse, like subwoofers, as the lakes deep beneath them fill and drain. Some are as large as Lakes Erie or Ontario. In 2013, Tulaczyk helped lower the first cameras and sampling tubes into one. He found microbes that survive on their own kind of fossil fuel: organics from the continent’s warmer times. Antarctica is often described as Earth’s largest desert, but it may also be its most extensive living wetland.
Tulaczyk has long been intrigued by the way that this sprawling wetland lubricates the ice above it, speeding up its journey toward the ocean. At a conference in the late ’90s, he learned about a mysterious subglacial event that occurred 200 years ago, underneath the Kamb Ice Stream, a glacier on the opposite side of West Antarctica from Thwaites. Until the mid-19th century, the glacier was flowing into the Ross Sea at an estimated 2,300 feet a year. But then, in the geologically abrupt space of only a few decades, this great river of ice all but halted. In the two centuries since, it has moved less than 35 feet a year. According to the leading theory, the layer of water underneath it thinned, perhaps by draining into the underside of another glacier. Having lost its lubrication, the glacier slowed down and sank toward the bedrock below. At its base, a cooling feedback loop took hold. Eventually, enough of it froze to its bed to keep it in place.
The story of the glacier that had suddenly halted stayed with Tulaczyk. Around 2010, he began to wonder whether water could be drained from underneath a large glacier like Thwaites to achieve the same effect. He imagined drilling down to its subglacial lakes to pump the water out of them. He imagined it gushing from the pumps’ outlets and freezing into tiny crystals before it even splashed onto the Antarctic surface, “like a snow gun.” The remaining water underneath the ice would likely flow toward the empty lakes, drying out portions of the glacier’s underside. With luck, a cooling feedback loop would be triggered. Thwaites would freeze in place. Catastrophic sea-level rise would be avoided. Humanity would have time to get its act together.
The morning after my visit, Tulaczyk wrote to say that his research group preferred to describe his plan as an “ice preservation” scheme, rather than anything that smacks of geo-engineering. Manipulating the flow of nation-size glaciers certainly qualifies as geo-engineering. But Tulaczyk is right to distinguish it from more dramatic, and truly global, interventions; instead of wrapping the Earth in a layer of aerosols to dim the sun, he merely wants to intervene at the glacier. His is only one of the preservation schemes that glaciologists are considering. Another team of scientists has suggested that mind-bogglingly large swaths of insulating fabric could be draped on top of vulnerable glaciers to keep them cold. Still another team has proposed that a curtain—made of plastic or some other material—be stretched across the 75-mile-wide zone where Thwaites meets the sea, to divert the warm water that is flowing underneath it.
In December, many of the world’s most prominent glaciologists gathered for two days at Stanford University to discuss ice preservation, following a smaller such meeting in the fall. For Tulaczyk, it was a thrill just to organize a meeting like this. More than a decade ago, he’d pitched similar workshops to the National Science Foundation and NASA, and was told “nope,” he said. At the time, many scientists worried that any talk of engineering ice sheets would distract from the necessary work of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Tulaczyk’s mentors had warned him that pursuing the matter further might damage his career.
Before the December meeting, I’d reached out to Ted Scambos, one of the lead investigators for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a $50 million study of the endangered glacier by more than 100 scientists around the world. Scambos told me that many of the scientists who were attending were still skeptical that any of the ideas would work. Some had declined to attend altogether. Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me that she sent in a video statement protesting the very premise of the meeting and calling it a distraction.
When I caught up with Scambos after the meeting, he said that he came away from it thinking that two things had shifted in the small world of glaciology. First, more scientists were now open to experimenting with ice preservation. Some had been convinced that there was no avoiding geo-engineering; it was going to happen, either at the glaciers themselves or at hundreds of other places around the planet, where seawalls and additional megastructures would need to be built if glaciers were lost.
The second shift Scambos noticed was that Tulaczyk’s idea—freezing a glacier into place—now had more momentum. The fabric-covering idea hasn’t gained much traction outside of groups working to preserve small glaciers in the Alps. And the curtain had come in for criticism at the meeting, in part because the sea edge of Thwaites is one of the most remote and forbidding environments on Earth. It was the last stretch of Antarctica’s coast to be mapped, its final terra incognita. Installing anything of serious scale there, underwater, would be extraordinarily challenging and fantastically expensive. Even if the curtain could be successfully installed, it would risk unintended consequences; it could entangle marine mammals and divert warm water to other ice shelves. Some of the assembled scientists found it easier to imagine hot-water drilling in Antarctica because they had actual experience doing it, whereas none of them had ever installed a sea curtain. It also helped that philanthropists, including a former executive at Google X, had expressed interest in funding field tests.
“The beauty of this idea is that you can start small,” Tulaczyk told me. “You can pick a puny glacier somewhere that doesn’t matter to global sea level.” This summer, Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, will travel to the Juneau Icefield in Alaska to look for a small slab of ice that could be used in a pilot test. If it stops moving, Tulaczyk told me he wants to try to secure permission from Greenland’s Inuit political leaders to drain a larger glacier; he has his eye on one at the country’s northeastern edge, which discharges five gigatons of ice into the Arctic Ocean every year. Only if that worked would he move on to pilots in Antarctica.
Even if these pilot experiments are successful, and hailed as such by the entire field, halting the mighty flow of Thwaites would still be a daunting challenge. To trigger a cooling feedback loop underneath its ice, a checkerboard array of separate drilling sites would be required. Estimates for how many range wildly, from a few dozen to thousands. In the annals of polar science, there is no precedent for a mission of this scope, as Tulaczyk well knows. In 2018, after five years of planning, it took a camp of 50 people in a much more accessible region of West Antarctica a whole field season to drill one borehole down to a subglacial lake. If you were operating 100 such sites, some economies of scale would kick in, but only to a point. A Thwaites field team could number 5,000 people—that’s roughly the peak population of Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, except in this case, they’d be deployed across one of the world’s most remote glaciers.
Very few polar explorers have been to Thwaites. Tulaczyk himself has never made it to the glacier, despite 12 expeditions to Antarctica. When I asked those who have been there about the prospect of sending a scientific mission of this size, they seemed dazed by the question. But Tulaczyk, who is not just a scientist but an engineer, has given it serious thought. I heard him out, and then, to try to imagine how the project might work, I talked with Rob Grant, who led logistics for the British Antarctic Survey’s most recent mission to Thwaites; Zoe Courville, who has helped keep dozens of traverses on Antarctica safe for American science missions; and Tanner Kuhl, an engineer with the U.S. Ice Drilling Program.
The mission’s cargo alone would fill thousands of shipping containers. They would all need to be loaded onto a very large boat that would sail from Punta Arenas, Chile, and cross the Southern Ocean, a latitudinal band where no land exists to stop sea winds from whipping furiously around the planet. In 1774, Captain Cook made his way across these stormy seas and approached Thwaites directly from the north, but he never saw it: He turned back while still more than 100 miles away after encountering a dense field of icebergs “whose lofty summits reached the Clowds.”
The planet’s two most active glaciers—Thwaites and Pine Island—terminate in the very same bay. They are constantly ejecting building-size blocks of ice into its waters. In this bay, calm breezes can become gale-force winds in just minutes. Ice fog can white out the surroundings. On average, human civilization sends only one vessel of brave souls a year into the waters near Thwaites, and in some years no one goes.
Even if docking alongside Thwaites were a simple matter, unloading people and cargo onto an ice shelf that can tower more than 100 feet above the water would be impossible. Nor can heavy planes land a bit farther in on the glacier, because its ice stretches and wrinkles during its final seaward sprint, riddling it with crevasses. Grant told me that it took his British team years to find an ice shelf that their ships could sidle up to. The good news: It’s just 12 feet high, and it leads to a relatively stable route inland. The bad news: It’s in the Ronne Inlet, 750 miles away.
The Antarctic field season is only a few months long. A cargo ship with a crane would need to trail an icebreaker into the Ronne Inlet and dock next to the ice shelf sometime in October. Mega-tractors would tow humongous bladders of fuel, wood crates packed with scientific instruments, and the rest of the cargo to a staging ground 150 miles into the interior. From there, a tractor convoy would set out across West Antarctica on a high ice plateau that runs alongside the continent’s tallest mountain range. At the front of the convoy, ground-penetrating-radar specialists would scan the path ahead for crevasses. When the snow atop a crevasse was too thin to support a tractor’s weight, they would adjust course, or blow up the crevasse with dynamite—sending a column of smoke and snow 80 feet into the sky—then fill it in using bulldozers.
After weeks on the ice, including whole days lost to extreme weather, the convoy would arrive at a second staging ground on the western edge of Thwaites, and then it would divide into a hundred smaller versions of itself, each taking its own path to a different drilling site on the glacier. During that first season, no one would even unpack a drill, much less a pump. They’d simply build each camp’s basic infrastructure, and a large berm to make sure that the winter snowfall didn’t bury it all.
Hot-water drills that can reach deep into ice have existed for decades. But there are only about 50 of them in the world, some weighing tens of thousands of pounds, made bespoke for missions in Greenland and Antarctica. The Thwaites mission would likely need more than double that number. On-site, bulldozers would heap snow into their heated holding tanks, and everyone would wait around while it melted. When at last hot water started jetting down from the drill’s showerhead, steam would billow off the ice. A small dent would appear. It would deepen into a white-walled borehole at a rate of one meter every minute, assuming everything went smoothly.
But it rarely does. Truffer, who is known for his experience with ice drilling, told me that there are always stops and starts. Broken parts are especially maddening, because there are no polar hardware stores at which to buy replacements. Even with no hiccups, the boreholes could take days to drill, especially where Thwaites thickens to more than a half mile. If one of those deeper holes were wide enough to admit an Olympic diver, and she dove straight down to the subglacial lake below, more than 10 seconds would pass before she splashed into its water.
All the drilling and pumping and tractors and camps would require a small city’s worth of energy. There might be no way to supply it cleanly. Solar panels could support some summertime operations, but not drilling and pumping. The camp that drilled a borehole for scientific research in 2018 required thousands of gallons of diesel fuel. To power 100 such sites would, in a terrible irony, likely require a great and sustained conflagration of fossil fuels.
If the operation ever happens, Tulaczyk won’t run it. He said that he has had extraordinary experiences during his multi-month trips to Antarctica, but he has also felt the cold sting of its isolation. He once described Antarctica to me as a preview of the inhospitable universe that exists beyond the vibrant bounty of Earth. He has missed 12 Christmases with his kids doing fieldwork there, and many of his wife’s birthdays. “There are a lot of divorced glaciologists,” he said. “I don’t want to join them.” He is nearing retirement anyway. He may not even live to see his plan come to fruition, and he told me he is okay with that. He has inspired younger scientists. Some of them have begun to develop more elegant iterations of his idea. This is the natural way of things.
Minchew, the MIT glaciologist, is one of those scientists. He has adopted the drilling part of Tulaczyk’s plan, but instead of pumping water out, he wants to pump warmth out, by lowering tubelike heat siphons into the boreholes. Tens of thousands of these siphons are already wedged alongside crude-oil pipelines in the Arctic. They pull up the subsurface heat that the pipelines emanate, so that it doesn’t melt the permafrost and make the ground go askew. If a heat siphon could reach the bottom of Thwaites, it might be able to freeze a region of the glacier’s base, creating a sticky spot. But the siphons used in the permafrost are only a few meters long; it may be difficult to lengthen them by orders of magnitude. There is good reason to try: Siphons don’t need diesel fuel. They’re powered by temperature differences alone. Minchew told me that if enough of them were lodged into Thwaites, like pins in a pincushion, they might be able to keep the whole thing in place. And they’d do it gently. They wouldn’t make a sound. They wouldn’t so much as glow.
Greenland’s Sermeq Kujalleq glacier is the Thwaites of the Arctic—the Northern Hemisphere’s fastest-crumbling edge. Every year, it dumps 11 cubic miles of ice into a fjord near the small town of Ilulissat. Before leaving Greenland, I flew north to see it. I landed after 8 p.m., and really should have called it a day. But I was feeling hardy from the musk-ox sausages that I’d eaten before takeoff, and I knew that the Arctic sun wouldn’t set for hours. I dropped my bags at my hotel, slipped on my parka, and hiked toward the fjord.
Several glaciologists who have worked in both Antarctica and Greenland told me that the Ilulissat fjord is the most spectacular icescape in the world. During the Pleistocene, its glacier bulldozed boulders and other debris into the fjord’s mouth, creating an underwater ridge. As a consequence, the gigantic icebergs that calve off the glacier can’t just slip directly into the Atlantic. They bounce around the fjord together for months on end. After they melt down a bit and find just the right angle of escape, the icebergs embark on great journeys. Locals take a grim satisfaction in the strong possibility that one of them rammed the Titanic’s hull. Some have likely drifted to latitudes as far south as Portugal.
I walked along Ilulissat’s streets of brightly colored houses to its outskirts, where small shacks are surrounded by sled dogs chafing at their chains. Most of Greenland’s residents are Inuit; their ancestors brought these dogs here from Alaska 1,000 years ago and used them to travel long distances across the Greenland Ice Sheet. They retain more than a trace of Arctic wolf in their physique and spirit. After climbing into the hills that separate the town from the fjord, I could still hear them howling into the cold wind.
It took me an hour to reach the fjord’s most iceberg-dense section. I had to hopscotch across a tundra of slate-colored rock and vivid maroon lichen, while attempting to avoid snowdrifts. I got stuck, thigh-deep, in one. By the time I dug myself out, it was nearing 11 p.m. and the sky was finally darkening. I began to regret setting out so late on my own, until I passed over a rise and saw the fjord in its full glory.
Dozens of icebergs were spread across the water like floats massing before a parade. I couldn’t help but project familiar shapes onto them—one resembled a giant polar bear kneeling in the water, searching for seals. All I could hear were small streams running off the tundra and the melancholy calls of gulls flying across the fjord. Occasionally, a distant iceberg would crack, and the sound would ricochet toward me, greatly reduced, like muffled gunfire.
I sat down on a patch of golden grass in front of the largest iceberg. It was a landscape unto itself, with a little mountain range on one side and a river running through its middle. Along its edges were sheer 100-foot cliffs, chalk-white like the coast of Dover. It was beautiful, and also disquieting. The whole thing was the size of a Manhattan block. And yet, compared with the ice sheet that had ejected it into the water, it was only a snowflake.
Twila Moon, the University of Colorado glaciologist, had recommended this hike to me in mid-March. I had called to ask about the video statement that she had sent to the Stanford meeting in December. Her position hadn’t softened in the intervening months. Human beings have directed the flow of rivers, with mixed success, for thousands of years, but Moon thinks that a river of ice is a force beyond our reckoning. She worries that grant makers and scientific talent will be seduced—and that precious resources will be diverted from emissions reduction to chase a techno-fantasy. Even small-scale tests of Tulaczyk’s idea are a waste of time, she told me, because as a practical matter, the technology could never be deployed at scale on Antarctica.
The first time I called Martin Truffer, the glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks with a penchant for ice drilling, he had seemed to agree. But then I saw him on my way up to Greenland, where he planned to land a small helicopter on the glacier that feeds the Ilulissat fjord. The U.S. Air Force had flown us part of the way in a C-130, but the plane broke down in Newfoundland, and we were stranded for several days. One night, we discussed Tulaczyk’s idea, and he acknowledged that the impoverished state of scientific research may have conditioned him to think too small.
Many polar science projects are held together by duct tape and the grit of people like Truffer, who spend long months in the field away from their families. But ice preservation on Antarctica wouldn’t be an ordinary science project. If a consortium of governments became convinced that Thwaites could be saved, and that trillions of dollars of flooding damage could be avoided, they might treat the project more like a military mobilization or mass vaccine deployment. By those standards, the many billions of dollars you might need—especially if the glacier had to be drilled and pumped continually, across many years—really isn’t that much money. Truffer remains skeptical of Tulaczyk’s project, but he said it would be much more imaginable if it were backed by those kinds of resources.
That’s really conceivable only in an asteroid-headed-for-Earth scenario where glaciologists are in total agreement that the loss of Thwaites is imminent. Funding, in that case, would be the easy part. Getting permission from Russia, China, and dozens of other parties to the Antarctic Treaty would likely be harder. Building an international consensus, manufacturing the equipment, and setting it up on Antarctica could take decades. Testing will certainly take decades.
In the meantime, the world’s ice will continue to dissolve. Even if we were to halt emissions immediately and entirely, we could still lose major glaciers at both poles within a century. We can see them fragmenting now, in real time. On my last night in Ilulissat, I went back to the fjord on a small icebreaker. As we moved through the pewter water, the thin sea ice beneath us fractured into every imaginable polygon. From the hills above, the icebergs had all seemed still and sculptural. Up close, it was easier to see that they were in flux. Meltwater glittered along their edges, and they were all drifting ever so subtly. One by one, they would soon head out to sea. If we want to keep our ice sheets and shores where they are, Tulaczyk’s idea may help. Maybe it will work all by itself, or in combination with other ice-control schemes. Or maybe all of these ideas are destined to fail. Either way, we should find out.
This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “The Glacier Rescue Project.”