Today, Explained - An inconvenient glacier

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

While the world’s leaders are meeting at COP27 to discuss climate change, Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier is melting. The world’s coastlines face catastrophic consequences. Rolling Stone��s Jeff Goodell went to see it with his own eyes. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and edited by Matt Collette and Sean Rameswaram, who also hosted. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Leaders and representatives from nearly 200 countries have been gathering in Egypt for COP27. It's the United Nations annual climate change conference. Many people feel COP27 is the world's best hope for climate action, but many critics say it's just greenwashing with little to really actually show for it. Climate justice! That's what we wanted! No! What do we want?

They're trying to figure out emission standards. They're trying to figure out emission standards. They're trying to figure out who should pay for global warming. They're talking about food scarcity. And we all know what happens if they don't make progress. Doomsday isn't coming next week, but it's out there. It's waiting for us. In the meantime, there's a doomsday glacier the size of Florida that's hanging on by its fingernails. And when it breaks apart, sea levels are going to jump.

If there's one piece of ice in the world that our modern world is dependent upon staying stable, it's that one. The Doomsday Glacier is coming on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. My name is Jeff Goodell. I am a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine and the author of a number of books about climate change. Most recently, The Water Will Come, Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and The Remaking of the Civilized World.

We reached out to Jeff because he's seen the Doomsday Glacier with his own eyes. You know, this whole trip was very dramatic and long in planning. We left Punta Arenas at the bottom of South America in Chile in January, which was the summer down there. And we sailed in this 304-4 foot long icebreaker ship with about 60 people on board. It felt like a kind of very historic journey because it was we went through the Strait of Magellan and then out into Drake Passage, which is well known by sailors as the roughest seas in the world. We had pretty scary swells for me. It was like 20-foot swells, and the ship was rocking,

and furniture was flying, and people were getting seasick and things. I was okay. And then it took us about 10 days, maybe two weeks, to reach Thwaites Glacier, which is on the western coast of Antarctica. It's about halfway down the coast of Antarctica. It's a very remote place. In fact, we were the first people actually who have ever were able to approach it from the sea because of the sea ice and the conditions are very difficult to be lucky enough to to get close to it. One morning at about 6 a.m.

there was a bunch of commotion on the ship and everybody jumped out of their bunks and ran up to the deck of the ship and there it was. This 150 foot high sheet of ice just sort of looming next to us. It was at once incredibly beautiful, incredibly surreal, and terrifying all at once. Just the sort of remoteness of it, the beauty of it, the silence of it, and the feeling that the fate of the world, of many cities in the world, depend upon how this glacier behaves and how this glacier moves.

What makes this particular glacier so important? I mean, Thwaites is really important for two reasons. One is that, you know, for a long time, scientists have been, obviously have understood that as the world heats up, ice melts. And that's been an obvious concern about climate change for a very long time. But a lot of the attention has been focused on Greenland and on mountain glaciers. Time-lapse video of a glacier in Greenland moving and calving new icebergs into the sea. A new study based on warming that's already occurred paints a dire picture that melting

ice from Greenland alone will cause sea levels to rise at least 27 centimeters, almost one foot over the next century. And for a long time, scientists believed that Antarctica was pretty stable. You didn't see a lot of change in the ice melt there. You didn't see the kind of collapsing off the coast that you see in Greenland. But then scientists realized that no, Antarctica is not stable. And the center of the instability in Antarctica is in West Antarctica. And it's particularly a glacier called Thwaites Glacier,

which is unstable in a particular way because of the way that warm water can get underneath it. And the thing that makes it so scary and so important in our picture of what's happening to our world is that this one glacier works like a kind of cork in the wine bottle of all of the West Antarctic ice sheet. And because of the contours of the ground and things underneath the ice, what scientists fear happens is if this one glacier goes, then it basically opens the door for the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is an enormous ice sheet. If it fell into and melted into the Southern Ocean, it would raise sea levels around the world about 10 feet. 10 feet of sea level rise is catastrophic for virtually every coastal city

in the world. And so that's why Thwaites is important. If there's one piece of ice in the world that our modern world is dependent upon staying stable, it's that one. It's crumbling and collapsing. We saw that while we were there. The question is, you know, how unstable and how quickly this ice sheet could collapse. And I think it's important to explain that the difference between how people think about ice melting, which is like a popsicle sort of on a picnic table on a hot summer day, which is basically what's happening in the Arctic, in Greenland. But what's happening in Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is entirely

different. The surface is not melting. You don't go to Thwaites Glacier and see water running off the surfaces you do in Greenland. And I've been to Greenland a number of times and seen this. What's happening in Thwaites is the changes in the warmth of the Southern Ocean are basically melting the glacier from below. And because of the way the glacier is set on a kind of reverse slope, it means that warm water is sort of flowing down deep under the glacier. The concern is that this glacier is not going to melt in the conventional way, but because it's being destabilized from below, it's going to kind of collapse. And collapse sort of like, imagine taking a tray full of ice cubes

and just sort of dumping them out. It's something like that. Do we have any idea how long until the Thwaites Glacier collapses? You know, that's the subject of, you know, much debate in the science community about this. It's certainly not going to happen next year or in 10 years, but whether it can happen in 20 or 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, no one is certain.

No one knows exactly what the timescale is. As one scientist I talked to about it said, there's no human analog for this. We've never watched a giant glacier like Thwaites collapse in real time before, so we don't really know how fast it can go. But it's happening faster than people previously thought. Yes. People thought it was very stable before, and now we know that it's not very stable. And, you know, again, the issue here is unlike Greenland, which is more or less a kind of gradual melt. There's not a lot of surprises scientists fear in the way that Greenland is melting as our planet warms up but at the weights glacier there are surprises and because of the way the slope underneath is shaped and because of the warm water getting underneath it all comes down to how long this

glacier will stay stable kind of it's like imagine pulling out the foundation of a house. And you can pull out a few bricks and a few bricks and a few bricks. But at a certain point, you pull out enough bricks and the house falls down. And no one knows how many bricks it's going to take before the Waite's Glacier collapses. But we know we're pulling bricks out. And that's what's terrifying. You've coined this nickname for this glacier. You call it the Doomsday Glacier. Do people get on you for being alarmist? Yeah, they do. But I'm proud of it. You know, I wrote a piece. I was one of the first journalists to really write an in-depth piece about this risk of collapse in Antarctica. And I wrote a very long

piece for Rolling Stone a few years ago. And I wrote a very long piece for Rolling Stone a few years ago. And I came up with this title sort of as I came up with much of my writing, you know, at three in the morning, sitting around in my gym shorts and a dirty t-shirt and thinking about, you know, what to call this piece. Down in Antarctica, a doomsday glacier is disintegrating faster than previously thought. Okay, that's terrifying. And I gotta say, it doesn't help that we're calling it the Doomsday Glacier. Can't we pick something a little happier, like the Free Guac Glacier, or the Have You Lost Weight Iceberg? But I think it's appropriate.

I mean, I don't mean to say it's going to fall apart tomorrow, but it's like, you know, we call a gun a lethal weapon because it can kill you. And if there's any glacier in the world that civilization depends upon staying stable, it's this one. And because of its risk of sudden collapse, I think it's an appropriate phrase. And it certainly has gotten people's attention. So it worked. It did work. I mean, you know, people talk about it and, you know, people would not be talking about it, I don't think, as much if we were calling it the Weitz Glacier. And I don't think that it's alarmist. I think it accurately suggests kind of what's at stake. Thank you. the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today explained back with Jeff Goodell, talking about the perilous effects of a doomsday glacier, if and when it breaks apart from Antarctica. But really, we don't need to wait for Thwaites to see the effects, because this, as you surely know, is already happening. Yeah, I mean, I started writing about sea level rise after Hurricane Sandy hit New York, and I saw all this water in lower Manhattan.

Sandy's 14-foot surge washed into Manhattan's South Ferry Station like a tidal wave carrying thousands of pounds of debris. And I was talking to a scientist at Columbia and he said, well, this is sort of a kind of interesting dress rehearsal for sea level rise because we had eight or nine feet of water in lower Manhattan. And that was sort of, and still is, the sort of high end of what we might see by the end of the century. But then he said, you really want to think about sea level rise, go down to Miami on a high tide. And I'm like, why? And he said, go and you'll see. So, I went to Miami on high tide, and I was walking through this area called Sunset Harbor where, you know, there's million-dollar condos. I actually bumped

into Lenny Kravitz, the rock guy, while I was wandering around. But, you know, I was wandering through water up to my knees on just a sunny day at high tide in Miami in this, like, district where there's million-dollar condos. And I was like, oh, this is a problem. And I realized that, you know, this city of Miami is built on borrowed time. And that's what began my whole journey into the book The Water Will Come and eventually led me to Antarctica.

So, present-day Miami, Lenny Kravitz and you were walking around and you got water up to your knees right next to million dollar condos. What does Miami look like in, I don't know, 50 years? Miami in 50 years looks like a very different place. Miami in 50 years has water in the living rooms of houses in low-lying areas. It has streets that are submerged. It has collapsing real estate values. It has new disease patterns that we don't know about yet and can't anticipate. It has people freaking out about the polluted water that's rising up in their front yard. It's a very different world.

I mean, I think that in 50 years there will be a lot of new building in Miami, a lot of structures that are elevated. Hopefully, maybe there'll be some even floating buildings, floating structures, things like that. Miami will have no choice but to figure out a way to live with water. There will not be a kind of dry Miami Beach. There will be an inundated Miami Beach. There will be drier places and wetter places, but the water will come.

What is Miami doing right now to prepare for that future? Well, you know, when I first went down there in 2013, they were doing basically nothing, which was stunning to me. They've done a lot now. I mean, they are taking this very seriously. They've spent a lot of millions of dollars improving drainage, which has been a big problem. So when the water comes in, getting it out as quickly as possible. As you can see at the edge of the sidewalk, looking like oceanfront property with the water overflowing there. They spent a lot of money building pumps, giant pumps the size of, like, you know, cars that are built in various neighborhoods to pump the water out when it comes in. Down on South Beach at 8th and Alton, there was a lot more water, cars driving through

several inches, while pumps really did their best to try and push it out of the area. They've changed the building code so that new buildings have to be higher. They've done a lot to elevate critical infrastructure above flood levels. So they're doing a lot, but they have a lot left to do. And it's not clear what the strategy is in the long term for the survival of the city. And how does that compare to how other coastal cities in this country and abroad are getting ready for this reality? Well, one of the problems that Miami has that other cities don't have is that Miami is built on a kind of porous limestone. Miami limestone is one of the most porous

limestones anywhere. And water just pours through it very, very, very rapidly. So you can't really build seawalls in the same way that you can in other places because the water will go underneath the seawall or through this forest limestone and pop up on the other side. Other cities like Charleston, for example, right now is building a, I think they're spending a billion dollars on a very large seawall to keep the water out. The Army Corps of Engineers and city leaders have been drafting plans that look at the impacts from flooding storms and hurricanes on the peninsula. Through that study, officials have suggested a 12-foot storm surge wall that will cost $1.1 billion

to help storm impacts for homes and businesses. Houston, I live in Austin, Texas right now, and Houston here has this thing called the Ike Dike, which is a $30 billion wall at the opening of Galveston Bay that will keep storm surges and higher water out. It was the destruction Hurricane Ike left in its wake in 2008 that sparked the idea to protect Galveston and Houston from the devastating surge of another monster storm. But because the topography and things of Miami, that's impossible to do down there. So they basically have to elevate buildings and figure out ways to live with water because the water is coming. You know, we see all along the Gulf Coast, Houston, New Orleans, all these places are sinking. Also, if the ground beneath you is sinking because of pumping out water from the aquifer below and other reasons. That accelerates sea level rise.

So places like New Orleans are in big trouble, even though they have spent millions and billions of dollars on all the dikes and other flood protection after Hurricane Katrina. Rain came down hard and fast, leaving flooding all over parts of southeast Louisiana. The rain caused problems from the North Shore to Plaquemines Parish and just about everywhere in between. You know, cities like Venice built on water but are also in enormous trouble. Also, they're subsiding and sinking. They're building

big gates to try to keep the water out, but that's not going to work. And then you see it in lots of cities around the world. Asia, Bangkok is in big trouble, Indonesia, Jakarta, places like that are also in big trouble. And so what's going to happen is not just the sort of inundation of cities and what that means for things like real estate values and stuff, but it also means migration. People are going to be leaving. And where are they going to go? Experts are predicting as many as one billion climate migrants crossing international borders in the balance of this century. Think of the millions that are crossing borders now

and the xenophobia and authoritarian populism that is caused by a large surge of refugees. And then imagine, if you will, what a billion climate refugees would do. It would end the possibilities of self-governance. Migration, immigration is a giant issue, and sea level rise is going to be kind of an engine of that. Do you see clear examples of good reactions to this and bad reactions to this? People who are taking the right steps and taking the threat very seriously? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, all of these cities I've mentioned, Miami, you know, New Orleans, Houston, New York, Boston, I think many cities are taking the threat very

seriously. I think the question is, like, what do you do? And where do you get the money? And how do you actually get things done and i think that it's pretty easy to get the army corps of engineers to build a big wall and try to keep the water out that way but really it's going to require thinking about things like retreat like managed retreat like saying we're not going to build in particular areas because it's getting flooded out all the time and how you deal with that and the kind of collapsing or reduction of the tax base is a big problem. So I don't think the awareness right now is the issue. I think the issue is what do we do and how do we do it and how much is it going to

cost? Are we at least past the point, Jeff, where people are refusing to acknowledge the threat that people say, oh, you know, sea levels, they rise and they fall. It's a cycle we've seen through history. Is that thinking, is that mentality a thing of the past at this point? Well, no. I mean, certainly there are plenty of people who still think it's sort of natural cycles and things like that. But I think that that's, you know, fading fast. And I think that it's not just because people can see high tide flooding in places where they didn all see it and feel it in our lives in a way that I think a lot of people then saw climate change as this sort of future event. There was a lot of talk about, oh, you know, my grandkids, they will have to deal with it. And I want to preserve and do the right thing for my grandkids. Well, now, just a decade or so later, now it's like, no, hell,

it's here now. It's happening to us now in real time. And I think you have to be particularly kind of deluded or blind to the world to not see that. And I think that's true broadly. I mean, I've seen it in my own reporting over the last decade. You know, I don't meet that many deniers anymore. I meet a lot of people that say, what the hell are we going to do and how much is it going to cost? And let's talk about what the hell we can do as it pertains to your Doomsday Glacier, to the Thwaites Glacier. Is there anything that can be done to stop it from collapsing or has that ship sailed?

No, that ship has not sailed. I mean, I think it's really important to underscore that what is driving this collapse of the Weiz Glacier, the Doomsday Glacier, is the warming of the ocean. The ocean is warming up because we're burning fossil fuels and putting CO2 into the atmosphere. It's very clear from all of the science that if we stop doing that and we stabilize the earth's temperatures we will stop warming up the ocean further and that greatly reduces the risk of collapse of thwaites glacier it doesn't mean that it won't collapse because there's still a lot of heat built up in the ocean and no one can say for sure but we can say for sure that if we stop burning fossil fuels and dumping co2 into the atmosphere we're going to lower the risk of that

happening so that is the number one thing that we have to do if you want to talk about how do we reduce the risk that the weights i mean there's wild nutty stories about using jacks and some kind of like weird like props to hold it up or something like that, or putting ropes around it and trying to hold it in place, and all kinds of crazy ideas, these sort of techno fixes. None of them do I or anybody that I know who's in the world of science who understands this stuff take at all seriously. The big tool is decarbonization, is getting off fossil fuels. That's the most important thing we could do. And then preparing in a realistic way for the fact that seas are going to rise. And we're not going to stop that.

The seas are going to rise. And we need to begin thinking about living differently on the coast. Jeff Goodell is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. You can find his writing on the Doomsday Glacier at Rollingstone.com. Our program today was produced by Avishai Artsy. It was edited by me and Matthew Collette and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. Laura Bullard fact-checked. The show is today explained. Turn it on