The Thwaites Ice Shelf begins where the massive Thwaites Glacier meets the West Antarctic coast.
But it isn’t, Pettit says: “There are five or six different ways this thing could fall apart.”
In satellite images, the center of the ice shelf looks stable. It meant that the ice’s underside was a rolling landscape-not what anyone expected. To Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, this was significant. When it does, the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet behind it could flow right into the ocean, pushing up sea levels around the planet, flooding coastal cities worldwide.įrom a distance, the ice shelf looks flat, but as Pettit walked she saw the guide flags ahead of her rise and fall against the horizon-a sign that she was walking across an undulating surface. Pettit was studying defects within the ice, akin to hidden cracks in an enormous dam, that will determine when the ice shelf might crumble. But if that were the case, Pettit wouldn’t have been there. The Thwaites Ice Shelf appeared healthy on the surface. A row of red and green nylon flags, flapping in the wind on bamboo poles, extended into the distance, marking a safe route free of hidden, deadly crevasses. Pettit was surveying a part of Antarctica where, until several days before, no other human had ever stepped.
#Lily pad float series
The brittle snow crunched like cornflakes underneath her boots-evidence that it had recently melted and refrozen following a series of warm summer days. On December 26, 2019, Erin Pettit trudged across a plain of glaring snow and ice, dragging an ice-penetrating radar unit the size of a large suitcase on a red plastic sled behind her.
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