In her latest book, The Quickening, the Pulitzer Prize finalist embarked on an epic odyssey to one of the most important – and least-explored – places in the world. In 2019, 57 scientists and crew embarked on a 54-day journey to the farthest reaches of Antarctica. Their mission: Thwaites Glacier, a rapidly crumbling block of ice the size of Britain melting so fast it's known as the world's " doomsday glacier ".
Thwaites is currently disappearing eight times as fast as it was in the 1990s, dumping 80 billion tonnes of ice into the ocean every year and accounting for 4% of the planet's annual sea level rise. Because of its colossal size and alarming collapse, this remote ice cap is not only considered one of the scariest places on Earth , but also one of the most important: the frozen ground zero in the global fight against climate change. Were Thwaites to completely melt, it could raise sea levels by 10ft or more, triggering " spine-chilling" global implications .
But a new study published this week suggests that the the so-called doomsday glacier may not be disappearing as quickly as had once been feared – though it is still rapidly vanishing. Instead of the glacier's ice cliffs soon collapsing into the ocean like a row of dominoes, the new study offers a somewhat more hopeful – if still dire – timeline of its disappearance. "What we are seeing with Thwaites Glacier right now is a disaster in slow motion," polar scientist Mathieu Morlighem, who led the study, told T.