Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: The Quickening

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

Today on The Sunday Story, author Elizabeth Rush discusses the book that emerged from her journey to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. She explains why Thwaites is under threat and why collaborative problem solving plays a critical role in an era of climate change. The voyage also helped her make an important personal decision: whether or not to become a mother.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. You may have heard of Thwaites Glacier before. Rolling Stone called it the Doomsday Glacier. It's a massive body of ice in Antarctica that currently acts like a cork in a wine bottle, holding back the rest of the western Antarctic ice sheet. But if it melts so much that it begins to break apart into the ocean, it could destabilize the entire basin. That could ultimately lead to a 10-foot rise in sea levels, drowning coastal communities across the globe. Four years ago, the ice in the southern ocean that surrounds Thwaites

Glacier loosened up, allowing an ice-breaking research vessel to go to a part of the glacier that had been inaccessible before, the calving edge, where the glacier meets the sea. Fifty-seven people, including climate scientists, support technicians, crew, and a handful of journalists made the 60-day journey. Elizabeth Rush was among them as a fellow with the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Her latest book, The Quickening, Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, is about her journey to Thwaites and also towards motherhood. She spoke with producer Ariana Garib Lee about her trip

and what the ice has to teach us about life on shore. Hi, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. So in 2019, you joined 56 scientists and crew members on a research vessel that was bound for Antarctica, Thwaites Glacier, and it was a trip that was going to take about two months. And you're not a scientist. You're a nonfiction writer. Why were you interested in going on this trip? So before I went to this glacier, I had been writing about sea level rise and its early impact on coastal communities all around the country for about a decade. And

I really focused on the lived experience of those coping with and adapting to and being fundamentally changed by rising seas. And one thing that many of those people with and adapting to and being fundamentally changed by rising seas. And one thing that many of those people had to learn to live with and that I had to learn to live with as I kind of covered this beat was profound uncertainty. Like, are sea levels going to rise three feet or six feet by century's end? We really don't know and you have to make decisions now about what to do today without knowing that future outcome. So that uncertainty I had to grow familiar with and sort of comfortable inside. And then I read this article about Thoates that basically said we have literally almost no information from this place and that there is this possibility of a much more significant, much more accelerated

rate of sea level rise because of what could happen in West Antarctica. And so it just became sort of like, okay, I want to see the source of the thing that's fundamentally driving so much change and transformation firsthand. Like I want to know it in my body. I'm such an experiential learner. And so I definitely went into this experience thinking, I might see this glacier fall apart and something fundamental will have to shift in me as a result. You did a lot of prep to go on this trip. Some of it was highly practical, buying long underwear, ski pants, love the idea of you in a balaclava. But there was also a bunch of reading and research, too. So what'd you find? And how did that shape the way that you wanted to write about Antarctica? Well, it wasn't until I kind of started to dig into Antarctica as like a topic that I realized all of the first

person accounts we have of this place have been written in the last 200 years or so. And when you think about what's happening in human history, you start to realize that those are 200 years that are really centered around imperialism and conquest and extraction. And the overwhelming majority of the narratives reflect that. So I spent, you know, months digging into them. And I was shocked that this place that seemed so wild and exciting to me, Antarctica, was really being like reduced to a set piece for tales of male conquest. I mean, literally almost every single book about Antarctica mentions like the same six events. It's Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole.

So he's the first person to get there. You get Mawson's shooting and eating his sled dogs. You get Shackleton's miraculous return after his wooden ship is like crushed in the ice and he and his men spend over a year trying to get back to civilization and some of them cross the Drake's Passage in a dinghy. I'm not trying to say those are not incredible feats, but they're just a really particular kind of story. And it's kind of like the only story or one of the main stories that we think about when we think about Antarctica. And I just grew really bored by it. And I was also frustrated, like a lot of the language that's used to describe the ice has a deep kind of vein of sexual violence.

So, you know, Antarctica's broad white bosom draws men towards it. Her impenetrable interior is the ultimate prize. And I would say that like boredom gave way to rage at some level. And I, you know, being invited to go on this mission meant that I had to delay my own plans or desire to get pregnant. Pregnant people are not allowed to deploy on scientific missions to the ice. And so, you know, somehow that fact was with me from the very beginning and I had this instinct that I wanted to write a different kind of book about Antarctica and I thought you know what if I include that desire in this book what if I think about motherhood and Antarctica in the same sentence, which is, you know, never done? And so that was like, I think, one of the driving impulses behind this book from the very start. And it's very much like a response to all of that literature that I

was telling you about. Yes, let's turn to motherhood, because that really is one of the things that makes this book really stand out. And one of the things that really jumped out to me as a woman who's in my early 30s was you talked a lot about how before going on this trip, you wanted to get pregnant and you had decided you wanted to get pregnant, but you still felt conflicted. What scared you about having a baby? Well, I think of our generation and kind of the generation slightly younger than us as facing an impossible question.

You know, like, it's 120 degrees in Phoenix. Is it still okay to have a child? I'm breathing toxic air from wildfires in Canada and Providence. Is it still okay to have a child? Vermont is underwater. Like, is it still okay to have a child? We can literally kind of see the early impacts of climate change around us. And the future that that child will live in, the fabric of it is yet to be determined. Like what human beings do in the next two decades will fundamentally shape our planet towards the end of this century. And yet we have to make a decision today about if we want to have kids without having the knowledge of what the future is going to look like. It's a really hard choice to make. And it kind of splits both ways. Like, is my child, is their presence going to have a negative impact on the planet? And will the planet have a negative impact on my child? Yeah. At one point, you're reading an essay that's literally called, Is It Okay to Have a Child?

And it goes in a really interesting direction because I think what you're talking about is the feeling of responsibility of bringing another carbon footprint into the world. But then you find out that the carbon footprint has this really unexpected history. Can you talk about that? Absolutely. This essay, Is It Still Okay to Have a Child by Me and Crist, really fundamentally changed the way I felt in relationship to this question. And that's because she spends like a significant amount of time talking about how, in fact, the fossil fuel industry and BP in particular popularized the carbon footprint. They dumped over $100 million into an ad campaign in the U.S. in 2005 trying to get people more familiar with the idea of a carbon footprint and that everybody has one. So, you know, the ads are like, what's a carbon footprint? Everybody has one. It's the amount of CO2 your day-to-day activities emit into the atmosphere. And then it's like, go to

our website. You can calculate yours. Before that moment, you can like literally look at language usage. People are not talking about carbon footprints. And now today it's this ubiquitous term. We all use it. We all think about it. And at a psychological level, it's shifting blame away from corporate entities and onto individuals. It's saying you have the power to address climate change by changing your consumer decisions. And like that that is your most powerful lever. Your lever for combating the climate crisis should be about whether I buy a Prius or a Jetta. It should be about whether or not you consume meat or are vegetarian. And we often see in those carbon calculators, the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have one fewer child.

They calculate it as 60 tons of CO2 kept in the ground. And I just want to, you know, call out the fact that I think it's a categorical error to say choosing to have a child or not have a child is the same kind of decision as choosing a Prius or a Jetta. They're not the same kinds of decisions at all. One is, I think of it as a spiritual decision. I think of it as a decision about like, who I want to be as a human being and the other is a consumer choice. So I don't think those are the same thing to begin with. And yet, I had spent a lot of time feeling guilty as an environmentalist for wanting to have a kid. And as I found out that these carbon calculators and their ubiquity was a result of funds pumped into advertising

through fossil fuel channels, I lost my feeling of guilt for wanting to have a child. I set it aside. I was like, oh, that's something that has been conditioned in me by these companies who don't want to stop extracting fossil fuels from the earth. It's a conditioned response. And I grew really angry that they had taught me to feel guilty for wanting to become a mom. I grew also a bit sad at like the years I had lost feeling that emotion and feeling kind of isolated inside of that emotion. And it was also deeply liberating to be like, okay,

I can let that go. Yeah. Like to me, it was really interesting that kind of before going on the trip, you had this idea, like, that the trip could help with some of these questions you were sitting with. And I was just curious about why the trip became open to the idea that I would see this glacier fall apart and that I wouldn't want to bring a child into the world. And at some level, that felt like truly being open to that and going on this trip felt like the truest space that I could like step into the journey in. And it felt absolutely terrifying. Like I'm going to take these two desires that I have to see a glacier calve and to bring a child into the world. And they are pulling me in opposite directions. And I'm going to see what happens when I like honor them at the same time, fully aware that like one might destroy the other. And yet I was like, okay, this is like, this is the only way I can actually write this

story. So I'm going to have to be really open to having no freaking clue what's going to happen. Coming up, author Elizabeth Rush tells Ariana what it was like after a long passage through rough seas to finally reach Thwaites Glacier. It was like the wall in Game of Thrones, like absolutely unfathomable. We'll be right back with the Sunday story. now our change will honor 100 years of the royal canadian air force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad from the skies to our change this two dollar commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. So you decide to go on a 60-day boat trip, which is really long to be on a boat. What was that like for you? Well, I remember when I signed up to go on the mission, my program officer was like, how long have you been on a boat?

And I was like, five days. And she was like, are you up for 60? And I said, sure. And she kind of paused and I could, you know, imagine the gears going in her brain like she doesn't understand what that means. And she told me, you know, point blank, it's easier for us to get help to folks who are at the space station than it is for us to get help to you when you're at this glacier. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So, you know, what did 60 days on this boat feel like? The thing that struck me most profoundly was that we took off from Punta Arenas in Chile, and it took us like 11 days to cross the Drake's Passage and kind of start to nose into the ice to the Amundsen Sea. And I was just like, I've never spent 11 days getting anywhere in my life. And on that boat, right? So like we were

our doctors, we were the cooks, we were the medics, we were the engineers and the electricians. And you know, if you slip and you break your ankle, someone on that boat's going to have to reset your ankle and then you're like a liability to everyone on the cruise. Right. Yeah. So the book has this really unusual style. When you just look at it on the page, it looks like it could be a screenplay or a play at different parts of the book. And it's really these block quotes that are from, yes, you know, the scientists that you were with, but also the technicians, the crew, the cooks, and the function of having it all together is that it sort of puts them on, you know, our storytelling tends to

focus on individuals and sort of raise up one singular perspective of an event. And that just literally sort of sweeps everyone else who's adjacent to that event off the stage. Climate change is not a singular problem with a singular solution that can be solved by an equation of some supremely brilliant person. And so I think societally, I think because we're so steeped in those stories of individual genius, I think we sort of believe that that singular solution is around the corner. It just hasn't been dreamt up yet. And that fundamentally undermines our ability to actually address the problem, which is at a scale vastly different.

We are all contributing to it in an ongoing way, and there's no one thing that's going to like fix it, right? And so it is a really hard story to tell, and we don't have a lot of models. So you're on the boat in confined quarters, rough seas, and then finally one day you arrive. And it's really the moment that you've been journeying towards. I'd love for you to read me a passage from your book about that moment of arrival. Absolutely. Yeah, so this is the moment when we finally make it to Thwaites.

Outside, Thwaites' gray margin wobbles in the gloaming. We wind alongside it, entering small coves and rounding on promontories. Our pace slow to hold this precarious line. The ice face soft as dunes, the night's new hint of darkness gives way to the bruised light of dawn, and many others appear to watch what each of the 56 scientists and crew members aboard have been working towards for weeks, for years, and in some cases for decades come into sharp focus. We don't talk. When someone wants to say something, they whisper, as though we're in a giant, roofless cathedral. Finally, we gaze upon Thoates, which until mere weeks ago was unreachable. For the first time since humans started keeping track, and most

likely in thousands of years, the sea has thawed enough for a ship to sail right up to the glacier's ice front. When you're arriving there, what was going through your mind? Well, I was like amazed. And at the same time, I knew that I had no idea what I was looking at. So I spent, you know, that entire day interviewing my shipmates and asking them to tell me what they saw. And through their eyes, I felt like I could start to make sense of what I was seeing because I had never seen anything like that before. To me, it was like the wall in Game of Thrones, like absolutely unfathomable, huge, exciting, but I didn't really know what I was looking at. I would be happy to read a couple short passages of other people talking about what they're seeing if that's like useful. Oh, yeah, of course. Let's see. Yeah, so I'll just say the speaker's name, and then I'll read what they told me on that morning.

Allie. I've been working on this region for one-third of my life, and I was worried that Thwaites would be a letdown after seeing so many other parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet. But this, this is different and not in a good way. Some bits look totally mashed up. Bastion. The face is mangled and gnarly. Joey. It looks like the ice was moving in really abrupt and violent ways,

like something tumbling got frozen in space. As you're processing those accounts, how did that clarify what you were feeling? The elation that I felt at our arrival very quickly was interwoven with like a deep sense of grief. We had been at that point traveling for over a month and to arrive at this place and to have the people who know other ice sheets tell me that it looks damaged, that it looks gnarly or mashed up. I couldn't believe really that our human actions so far away were like fundamentally changing the shape of this thing that felt so otherworldly and in my mind was so separate from human civilization so I would say my elation was quickly underscored with a deep sense of grief yeah I can only imagine. At this point in the trip, the most important science kind of gets underway. Like this was in many ways the point of the mission to get there. What are the scientists actually doing? literally cruising along the entire ice front at like a really shockingly close distance. I think we're like a hundred meters from the ice front. And you have to remember that we can see about

like a hundred meters of ice floating above the water. But that also means like with an iceberg, there's a significant portion of the ice shelf that's floating in the ocean supporting that ice. And it's a lot bigger than the ice that we can see. So we're talking, you know, a couple hundred meters deep. So we're cruising, we're this tiny boat cruising alongside this massive chunk of ice. And the ship's sonar equipment is on. And we're literally recording the ocean floor depth. We're trying to gauge the depth of the troughs that are feeding warm water under Thoates. We're also trying to gauge the depth of the ice front because if we have that information, that means that we'll be able to

use it to safely send a submarine under the ice shelf to begin to record the most important information we need from this mission, which is what's the temperature of the water beneath the ice? How are the currents moving beneath the ice? What does the ice shelf look like if you are in the ocean and you're looking up at it from underneath? So what are the patterns of melting on the underside of the ice shelf? And so that information that we gather the first day really makes it possible for us to send a submarine under the ice later on in that week. Right. And later that week, the scientists do send the submarine under the ice. What data did it gather and what do scientists learn from it? It gathered really up close visual renderings of the seafloor where they discovered hundreds and hundreds of corrugation ridges. They kind of look like tractor tracks. And what they tell us is that what we're seeing in terms of the speed of glacial retreat has been outpaced by our visual observations in the past couple hundred years. So Thwaites can move faster, you know, at a scale of two to three times than we previously understood.

When we come back, Elizabeth witnesses the moment she's been dreading. Stay with us. So at some point, the science actually comes to a really abrupt stop. And I'm turning now to the calving events that you witnessed, you know, the moments where the glacier actually breaks apart. And one of those events you could see the face of the glacier just crumbles right in front of you. But the other one you couldn't see, it was invisible to you. And that turned out to be a lot scarier. Can you explain what happened there? What happened? The way I remember it is that I woke up one morning and I went up to the bridge and we had been at the western edge of the weights for about

a week. And it was like this absolutely gorgeous morning. It was the first morning that was bright blue skies in a week. And I went out on the bridge and I took a bunch of photos and there were all of these icebergs in the bay in front of us. And it was, to my eye, incredibly beautiful and like picturesque. And I genuinely didn't think that much about it. And I maybe did an interview or two, went to lunch. And when I came out of lunch lunch I went into the computer lab to transcribe interviews and there was the chief scientist and he was sort of compulsively clicking back and forth between two aerial satellite images of our work area and these are the first images that have come on board in over a week we have next to no internet.

So this whole week, we've kind of had no information about what's happening, like in the world at large, nor in the bay around us other than what we can see. And he's looking at these two images. And in one, the Waite's ice shelf we are, looks like this relatively sturdy thing. It's like a big slab of ice. And in the next one, it looks like someone took a hammer to that ice and shattered it into hundreds of pieces.

Oh, my gosh. And they're dated. And the first one is, like, dated from the day we arrive or the day after we arrive. And the second one is the morning of the day that we're in. And I just get goosebumps and I suddenly understand that like what I was looking at that morning was a collapse of the ice shelf right in front of us. And Rob and I are kind of like trying to piece it together. He's like, it was sturdy. It was like this on the day we arrived. And now it's this other thing. And he

said to me, you know, it looks as big as the Larson B collapse, which is one of the largest examples of ice shelf collapse that we have in sort of recorded human history. It's a point in time where an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island just disintegrates over the span of a month. When was that? It was in 2002. And it's, you know, we capture it in the same way through aerial satellite imagery. So as soon as we recognize that a big chunk of the Waits Western ice shelf is literally falling apart all around us, the order goes to the captain, like, we need to leave now. Because these are massive icebergs that are, you know, drifting out into sea. And, you know, if you titanic and you're on a

boat the one thing you want to do is avoid icebergs right right um so that's it like we flee the we flee the study area that afternoon never to return we go to the eastern edge of Thoates afterwards, and we would spend a couple days there. Then we would go to Pine Island Glacier, which is adjacent to Thoates. We'd spend a couple days there. We would return to a couple of remote island chains. And then literally, like, the ocean really starts to freeze over all around us. And the chief scientist and the captain make a decision to leave early because I can still remember him saying like, the Western threshold is closing and we need to get out of here. So, you know, there's concern.

Oh, gosh. We wake up for a couple days and at first the ocean is sort of covered in this like icy mat. The next couple of days, the ocean is covered in these like bizarre white amoeba-like pancakes. And then the next day I wake up and we're like suddenly in much thicker flow. And it would take us a couple of days to actually get out of the inner amongst and see. So you return in 2019 from the trip and shortly thereafter you did get pregnant and you had a son. What did being on this trip teach you about to like recognize the animacy of this glacier to see it change in geologic history, it was impossible for me to see at speed, even though I was like right upon return that it was really hubristic of me to think that I could go somewhere that I had never been, had no real relationship with other than a kind of like hypothetical one in my head. And like recognize it, see it, call out its actions and understand them and return home. You know, there are lots of different cultures

on the planet that live alongside ice and that recognize the animacy of the ice. And they have these really incredible stories where, you know, glaciers eat people as retribution or they're life-giving and mothering in their, you know, seasonal release of meltwater. And I had to recognize that those are stories that rise up out of people in places that have deep, ongoing, intergenerational relationships with those glaciers. And I had no such relationship. So I think at some level, what that attuned me to as a mother is that I really want my son

to be able to recognize the movements and the animacy of the more than human world. And if he's going to be able to do that, he's going to be able to do that in his backyard. For instance, I think a more realistic way to talk about it is to just say, he and I bike along the Narragansett Bay all the time. And instead of talking to him about like, look at the bay, look at the trees, I say stuff like the trees are waving to you, like the bay is greeting you. And I'm trying to just teach him to not always tell the story or imagine, you know, nature in relationship to him, but that it is its own thing and it is acting and alive and changing.

And what do you hope he'll take away from that? How do you hope that'll change things? I mean, I think that it's that kind of deep fundamental change that the climate crisis is asking of us. That's like a change in ethics and morals and legal regulations. Like if you start to recognize the bay as a being, then, you know, dumping a bunch of toxic crap into it becomes completely untenable. And I think that instead of kind of enforcing or forcing a world shift from like a top down kind of legal framework, like I think that that's one way of doing it, but then you have all this pushback all the time. And it's sort of like moving a rock up a really gigantic hill. And I think,

you know, it's equally important to kind of change the structure of the hill, you know, change the shape of the way he imagines the world that he lives in. Elizabeth, thank you so, so much for joining us. It was a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me. This was such a pleasure. Elizabeth Rush teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University and is also the author of Rising Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This episode was produced by Abby Wendell and Ariana Garib Lee with help from Henry Hottie. It was edited by Liana Simstrom.

Maggie Luthar was our audio engineer. The Sunday Story team includes Jenny Schmidt, Justine Yan, and Andrew Mambo. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.