The Sunday Story: The Quickening
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Am I sarasi? And this is the sunday story. You may have heard a sweats glaser before rolling stone called IT the doomed glaser, a massive body of icon antartica that currently act like a coin, a wine bottle, holding back the rest of the western antarctic. But if IT melts so much that he begins to break apart into the ocean, IT could disabilities the entire basin that could ultimately lead to a tin foot rise in sea levels, drowning coastal communities across the globe.

Four years ago, the ice in the southern ocean that surrounds the wait glure loosened up, allowing an icy breaking research vessel to go to a part of the glaser that had been inaccessible before the cavin edge, where the glaser meets to see fifty seven people, including climate scientists, support technicians, crew and a handful of journalist, made the sixty day journey. Elizabeth rush was among them as a fellow with the national science foundations, antarctic artists and writers program her latest but the quickening creation and community at the end of the earth is about her journey to twist, and also towards motherhood. SHE spelled with producer ariana gary lee about her trip and what the ice has to teach us about life on shore.

Hi is a bit. Thank you so much for joining us, my pleasure.

Thank so much for having me.

So in two and nineteen, you joined fifty six scientists and crew members on a research vessel that was bounds for antarctica. Sweet glaser and IT was a trip that was gonna about two months. And you're not a scientist, you're a non fiction writer. Why are you interested in going on this thread?

So before I went to this glaser, I had been writing about sea level rise um and it's early impact on coastal communities all around the country for about a decade and I really focused on the lived experience of those coping worth 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 R, C levels going to rise three feet or six feet by centuries end. We really don't know. Um 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 the eats 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 western arctic cut. 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.

First hand, like, I wanted know IT in my body. I'm such an experiential learning, and so I definitely went into this experience thinking I might see this glaser 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 boat, clover.

But there is also, there is also a bunch of reading and research too. So what you find, and how did that shape the way that you wanted to write about the antarctic? Ca.

well, IT wasn't until I kindly 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 two hundred years or so.

And when you think about what's happening in human history, you start to realize that those are two hundred 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 at this place that seems so wild and exciting to me and was really being like reduced to asset peace for tales of mail conquest. I mean, literally almost every single book about antarctica mentions like the same six events.

It's, uh, a monson's conquest of the south pole. So he's the first person to get there. You get moths shooting and eating his slide dogs.

You get shackleton s maculate return after his wooden ship is, like crushed in the ice. And he and his men spent over a year trying to get back to civilization. And some of them cross the drinks passage in IT dini.

I'm not trying to say those are not incredible feat, 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 the antarctica. And I just grew really bored by IT, and I was also frustrated, like a lot of the language that used to describe the ice has a deep kind of vein of sexual violence.

So, you know, and arctic a, as broad White buzzer m draws men towards that. Her inpenetrable interior is the ultimate prize. And I would say that like boredom gave way outrage 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 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 the injunction, and I thought, you know, what if I include that desire in this book? What if I think about motherhood and antarctic ga in the same sentence which is you know never done um 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 our 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 us book really stand out and one of the things that really jumped out to me as a woman whose in my early thirties, um 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 impasse. Able question, you know, like it's one hundred twenty degrees in phoenix. Is IT still okay to have a child? I'm breathing toxic air from wildfire in canada.

Providence is IT still OK to have a child. Vermont is underwater. Like, is this still locate 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 gonna look like. It's a really hard choice to me.

And IT kind of split both ways, like, is my child? Is their presence gonna 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 OK to have a child and IT goes in a really interesting direction because I think what your 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. Could you talk about that?

absolutely. This essays is already to have a child by me. And quest really, fundamentally changed the way I felt in relationship to this question.

And that because he spends like a significant around a time talking about how, in fact, the fossil fuel industry in B. P in particular, popularized the carbon footprint, they dubbed over one hundred million dollars into an ad campaign in the us. In two thousand and five, trying to get people more familiar with the idea of a carbon footprint and that everybody has one.

So you know the address, like what's a carbon footprint? Everybody has one. It's the amount of CEO to your data.

Day activities admit 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 is this ubiquity.

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 lover for combating the climate crisis should be about whether I buy a prior a jada IT should be about whether not you consume meat or a vegetarian. And we often see in those carbon calculators the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have one fewer child. They calculated as sixty tons of co.

Two kept in the ground. And I just wanna, 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 press or a java. They're not the same kinds of decisions at all.

One is, I think of IT is a spiritual decision. I think of IT as a decision about like who I wanna be as a human being. And the other is is a consumer choice. So I don't think those are the same thing to begin with. And yet, I would spend a lot of time feeling guilty as an environmentalists for wanting to have a kid.

And as I found out that these carbon calculators and their usec wedding was a result of funds pumped into advertising through fossil fuel channels, I lost my feeling of guilt from wanting to have a child. I said, IT aside, I was like, oh, that something that has been conditioned in me buy these companies who don't wanna stop extracting fossil fuels from the earth it's it's a conditioned response. And I grew really angry that they had taught me to feel guilty for wanting to become a mom.

Um I grew also a bit sad. I like the years I had lost feeling that emotion and feeling kind of isolated inside of that emotion. And IT was also deeply elaborating to be like.

okay, I can let that go. Yeah, like to me, I was really interesting that kind of before going on the trip, you have this idea like that the trip could help with some of these questions you are sitting with. And I was just curious about why why the trip became linked to the questions you had about motherhood.

I would say, you know, I went on the trip open to the idea that I would see this glaser fall part 儿 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 and and IT felt absolutely terrifying, like i'm going to take these two desires, but I have to see a glaser cave into bring a child into the world, and they are pulling me in opposite directions.

And i'm going to see what happens. What 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, having no freaking clue what's gna happen.

Coming up, author Elizabeth rush tiles oriana what IT was like after a long passage rough to finally reach weight.

Glaser IT was like the wall and game of the ones like absolutely unfazed.

Will be right back with the sunday story.

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So you decide to go on a sixty day boat trip, which is really long to be on a boat. What was that like for you?

I will. I remember when I signed up to go on the mission, my program officer was like, hello, if you ve been on a boat and I was like, five days and he was like, are you up for sixty 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, a point blank.

It's easier for us to get help to folks through at the space station. Then IT is for us to get help to you when you're at this. Glaser, oh my gosh. yeah. So, you know, what did sixty days on this boat feel like?

The thing that struck me most profoundly was that, you know, we took off from pondar as in chili and IT took us like eleven dies to css the drink's passage um and kind of start to nose into the ice to the amounts and sea and I was just like i've never spent seven years getting anywhere in my life and you know during that time we just didn't see any other human beings. Um there was no amazon to deliver something if like you didn't have what you needed. All of all of the support that was going to be available to us was on that boat, right? So like we were our doctors, we were the cooks, we were the medic, we were the engineers in the electricians. And you know, if you slip and you break your ankle, someone on their boats can 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 screen play or play a 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 and the function of having IT altogether is that IT sort of put them on IT. IT allows them to blend. And I was curious why you made .

that choice yeah um I guess you know our storytelling tens to focus on individuals in sort of raise APP 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 you know a supremely brilliant person and so I think like society, I think because we're so steped in those stories of individual genius um I think we sort of believe that that singular solution is around the corner, just hasn't been draped 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 is no one thing that's gonna like fix IT, right? And so IT is a really hard story to hell. And we don't have a lot of model.

So you are 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 journey towards. I'd love free to read me a passage from your book about that moment of arrival.

absolutely. Yes, so this is the moment when we finally make IT to the weights outside the weight gray margin warbles. In the glooming, we wind alongside IT, entering small coves in rounding on promoter aries.

Our pace slow to hold this precarious line. The ice face soft is dunes, the nights new hint of darkness gives way to the Bruce light of dawn. And many others appear to watch what each of the fifty six 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 is that we're in a giant roofless cathedral. Finally, we gaze upon the rights, which until new weeks ago, was unreached for the first time since humans started keeping track. Most likely in thousands years, the sea has thought enough for a ship to sell right up to the glacier's ice front.

When you're arriving there, what was going through your mind? Well.

I was like a maze. And at the same time I knew that I had no idea what I was looking at. So I spent on that entire day interviewing my ship mates 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, I was like the wall and game of the ones like absolutely huge, exciting but I didn't really know what I was looking at. Um 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 say yes. So i'll just say the speaker's name, then i'll read what they told me on that morning. Ali, i've been working on this region for one third of my life, and I was worried that sweats would be a let down 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 bajin the faces, mangold and narrow joe IT looks like the ice was moving in really abrupt in violent ways, like something tumbling up, frozen in space.

As you're processing those accounts, how did that clarify what you are feeling?

The elation that I felt that are arrival very quickly was interwoven in with a good, 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 issues um tell me but IT looks the image that IT looks um nearly or mashed up. I couldn't believe ve really that our human actions so far away, we're like fundamentally changing the shape of this thing that felt so other worldly 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 um 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 sexually doing?

Well, we spend that first day litter 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 metres 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 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, a solar cruising or this tiny boat cruising alongside this massive chu N K of eye. And the ship's sonar equipment is on, and we're literally recording the ocean floor depth. We're trying to engage the depth of the of the dough that are feeding warm water under the weights.

We're also trying to gage the depth of the ice front because if we have that information, that means that we will 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 us some marine 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 to gather and what do scientists .

learn from in ah IT gathered really up close visual renderings of the sea floor, where they discovered hundreds and hundreds of corrugation ridges that kind of look like tracor 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 the weight can move faster, you know, at a scale of two to three times. Then we previously understood .

when we come back, Elizabeth witnesses the moment she's been dreading stay with us.

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So at some point, the science actually comes to a really abot stop. And i'm turning now to the caving events. You witness us, you know, the moments where the glass are actually breaks apart. And one of those events, you could see the face of the glass are just crumbles right in front of you um 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 wake up one morning and I went up to the bridge and we had been um 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 um 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 and like pictures um and I genuinely didn't think that much about IT and I maybe didn't interviewer to went to lunch and when I came out to 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 arial satellite images of our work area and these are the first images that have come on board.

And over a week we have next to no internet. Um so this whole week we've kind of had no information about what's happening not 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 zaidi ice shelf where we are looks like this relatively sturdy thing. It's like a big slab of ice. And in the next one IT looks like um someone took a hammer to that ice and chatted IT into hundreds of pieces oh my gosh. And they're dated. And the first one is like dated from the day we arrive over the day after we arrive. And the second one is the the morning of the day that we're in um and I just get goose bumps 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 Robin, I are kind of like trying to piece IT together he's like IT was dirty. IT was like this in the day we arrived and now it's this other thing and and he said to me, you know, IT looks as big as the lose and b collapse, which is one of the largest examples of ice shelf collapse that we have in sort of recorded human history at a point in time um where and I shot the size of road island juice integrates .

over the span .

of a month one was a IT was um two thousand two and it's we capture IT in the same way through arial satellite imagery. So as soon as we recognize that a big chunk of the weight western night shelf is literally falling apart all around death, the order goes to the captain like we need to leave now um because these are massive icebergs that are you know drifting out into the and you know if you know titanic and you're on a boat, the one you want to do is avoid icebergs, right? 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 the weights afterwards and we would spend a couple days there um then we would go to hind island glaser, which is a Jason to the way to. We spend a couple of days there. We would return to um a couple of remote island genes.

And then literally like the ocean really starts to freeze over all around death and the chief scientist and the captain and make a decision to leave early because um I can still remember him saying like the western threshold is closing and we need to get out of here. So there is concern go, we wake up for a couple days. And at first the ocean is sort of covered in this, like ice math. The next couple days the ocean is covered in these like bizarre White a mib, 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 .

a month and see. So he returned in in twenty twenty from the trip. And shortly there, after you did get pregnant and you had a sign, what did being on this trip teach you about how you wanted to show up as a mother?

Um you know I went on the trip having this desire to like recognise the animal acy of this to see a change in front of me and to then feel myself changed as a result um and in fact, even though the glaser was moving at a rate that is exceptional in geologic history, IT was impossible for me to see its speed even though I was like right in front of IT and I realized sort of 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 a longside ice and that recognize the antithesis of the ice and they have these really incredible stories where you know glaces eat people as retribution or um their lifegiving and mothering in there.

You know seasonal release of melt water and I had to recognize that those are stories that rise up out of people in places that have deep ongoing into general relationships with those glaciers. And I had no such relationships. Um so I think at some level what that attuned me too as a mother is that I really why my son to be able to recognise the movements and the animal acy of the more than human world.

And if he's gonna able to do that, he's gonna able to do that in his backyard. For instance, I think of a more like realistic way to talk about IT is to just say, you know, he and I bike along the narrow against IT 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 and relationship to him, but that IT is its own thing and IT is i'm acting and alive and changing and what do you .

hope he'll take away from that? How do you hope that would change things? I mean.

I think that is that kind of deep, fundamental change that the climate crisis is asking of us. That's like a change in ethics and morals and a legal regulations. Like if you start to recognise the bay as a being, then you know dumping a bunch of tax that crap into IT becomes completely untenable. And I think that instead of kind of enforcing or forcing A A world shift from like a top down kind of legal framework, like I think that that's one way of doing that, but then you have all this push back time and it's sort of like moving a rock up a religion gantick hill. And I think, you know, it's equally important to kind of change the structure of the hill, change the shape of the way he imagined 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 final list for the police surprise. This episode was produced by evy window and arianna lea with help from Henry hoi. IT was edited by liana simps rog magi lutha was our audio engineer.

The sundays story team includes Jenny smith, Justin and Andrew mobo. Leona symptoms is our supervising producer. Iran, the gucci is our executive producer.

Am I jaso a verses back tomorrow with all the news? You need to start a week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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