The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Transcript:
Luis Hernandez: This is the Public’s Radio. I’m Luis Hernandez. Thwaites Glacier was first spotted by polar researchers in 1940. It’s named after American glaciologist Frederick Thwaites. As the climate changes, this glacier could be one of the greatest contributors to sea level rise, nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier. Thwaites is at the center of the 2023 nonfiction book “The Quickening” by Rhode Island author Elizabeth Rush. In it, she tells the story of her weeks-long journey to Antarctica on the icebreaker known as the Palmer. Rush joins me now for this conversation, kicking off The Public’s Radio’s book club. Elizabeth, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Elizabeth Rush: Thanks for having me.
Hernandez: Elizabeth, give us the brief synopsis about this book, what it means to you.
Rush: I think of it as a book with sort of two interwoven storylines. One tells the story of this extraordinary journey that I took on an icebreaker to the calving edge of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. The other is a much more personal journey around what it means to want to have a child as the climate crisis accelerates.
Hernandez: What inspired you to want to take this journey to go to Antarctica?
Rush: I had been writing and researching early impacts of sea level rise on coastal communities since 2010. That there is a certain amount of uncertainty in our climate models was something that I had grown really comfortable with, like three feet of rise or six feet of rise by the end of the century, we don’t really know. So we have to be kind of open and aware in our adaptive techniques to that range of possibilities.
In 2017, I read an article about this glacier, Thwaites, in Antarctica, that made me think maybe those predictions are really conservative and maybe there’s a rate of change that would give us ten feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. If that’s going to happen, it’s going to be because of how this very particular glacier in Antarctica behaves. So I wanted to see the source of that really profound uncertainty up close.
Hernandez: How did you get to take this journey? You had researchers, you had journalists, you had a whole bunch of different people, but how did you get on that boat?
Rush: I actually had to write, I think it was a 60-page application to the National Science Foundation. I really wanted to go to Thwaites, and this was the first year they were going to have field work at the glacier, so I knew it was an incredible long shot. And actually, when I was on a book tour for my previous book, I chose different universities to visit that had researchers working on Thwaites. I went and met them and then asked them to write me letters saying that they would invite me to do field work with them. So that was all part of creating that application.
Hernandez: And then there are other things you have to be able to meet to be able to go on the journey, right?
Rush: Yes. Once I got accepted, then I had to do 40 pages of paperwork to physically qualify to go to the ice. I had to have an EKG. I had to have a psychological assessment. I also had to have a pelvic exam. I had to prove that I wasn’t pregnant because, as it turns out, pregnant people aren’t allowed to go to the ice. So it’s a deeply involved process to go to Antarctica with the U.S. government.
Hernandez: I found that interesting when you brought it up in the book because this becomes part of this underlying theme, which is you were thinking about starting a family before this journey and then, of course, after the journey you did, and you are now expecting your second. How much did that question weigh on you as you’re taking this journey, as you spent all this time in Antarctica?
Rush: I mean, the truth is, right around the time that I got accepted to be part of this mission, I was at this moment in my life where I knew I wanted to have a family. My husband and I both had stable jobs. We’d been talking about having a family for a couple years. I was 35 years old, which is, as many folks probably know, kind of the age at which fertility starts to go down. To go on this mission meant that I really had to put off my plans to get pregnant for one full year.
As a career environmentalist and environmental writer, that question of “should I have a child now as the climate crisis accelerates” was very much on my mind during this time. I think I kind of carried it with me to the ice. If I’m being honest, I was really nervous about what the experience would do to that desire, but also what that desire would do to the experience; how my interest in becoming a mother might shape what I saw when I got to Antarctica.
Hernandez: And like you said, no one pregnant is allowed on the ship, even people who maybe are in the first trimester. Why is that?
Rush: You have to go back in Antarctic history a little bit and understand that the first person to see Antarctica saw the ice 200 years ago. In the time since then, during most of those two centuries, women were all but prohibited from going to the ice. So there’s really this kind of like deep structural exclusion of females from the Antarctic space. So why aren’t pregnant people allowed to go to Antarctica? In part, it’s because we don’t have a health care system to support pregnant people on the ice and that’s in part because we don’t tend to think about females and Antarctica in the same sentence, in the same space.
Hernandez: This journey from South America to Antarctica is one of the most treacherous paths for any ship to go through, and sometimes you get massive waves and hurricane winds. What was that like? And how often did you get seasick?
Rush: It was really intense, I’m not going to lie. So we crossed the Drake’s Passage, which is the most predictably wild seas in the world. We had about two days of the crossing where we were regularly in 20-, 25-foot swell. That caused the ship to kind of keel and tip about 40 degrees off center in either direction at a really frustrating rate of about once per minute.
Hernandez: I’m getting seasick as you’re describing this.
Rush: Most people on board got really sick. I’ve never been prone to seasickness and I was really lucky that I didn’t get sick. But when I was laying in my bunk I couldn’t sleep, because I kind of just felt like I was in a dysfunctional hoverboard. My shoulders would pitch down, my feet would pitch up, and then some version of the reverse. But it was awesome, let’s put it that way.
Hernandez: Thwaites wasn’t the first part that you got to see. But describe for me, because I loved how you did it in the book, what it was like when you first laid eyes on Antarctica, because there’s not a lot to see, but it’s still an amazing view, I’d imagine.
Rush: By the time we reached Thwaites, we had been at sea for a month. We were the first humans in the history of the planet to actually see the place where this glacier discharges ice into the sea. Many of the scientists on board had been studying it for years, if not decades. I woke up like a kid on Christmas morning the day that we arrived, and I ran up to the bridge. There was just this deep sense of reverence to finally be looking at this ice that is so important to us. It is really hard for me to describe to this day.
The only point of reference I had was that it kind of looked like the wall in “Game of Thrones,” just a massive wall of ice. Our ship is about 60 to 70 feet tall, and it loomed above it probably another 40 feet. But what’s really wild is that we’re sailing along the front of a floating ice shelf. An ice shelf is like an iceberg in that what you can see above the surface of the water is really like a small piece of it. We could see about 100, 120 feet of this ice wall in front of us stretching to the horizon in every direction. That meant that there was almost a thousand feet of ice floating in the ocean alongside us, which is just really massive.
Hernandez: I love this part. When you finally did go on to the land, you went with a research group. One of the people with the group said, “Has anybody here ever walked on a glacier?” Your response was, “I’m a New Englander.” I’m wondering, what is it like walking on a glacier?
Rush: Not that different from what it’s like out there today.
Hernandez: As of this interview, by the way, it’s 20 degrees outside and icy.
Rush: Yeah, I mean, it really kind of depends. What was fascinating to me was we got to leave the boat on a string of islands just this side of Thwaites, and to get up to the different areas of the islands where we wanted to do our field work there were no human paths, so we followed penguin paths. Penguin paths are really not dissimilar from the way humans trudge through the snow, and sometimes the places where the road is the most worn it’s also the most slippery. In this case, if you’re following penguin tracks, the path is kind of tinged pink because penguin poo is this like really ethereal pink color. So that was incredible, to kind of realize that for the first time in my life I wasn’t following a human trail; I was following a penguin trail. Icy as can be, though.
Hernandez: Going back to one of the underlying themes of this book, you’re taking this journey, which took a few months. You are asking yourself, and you asked a lot of your shipmates, about children, having children. Then afterwards, you did become a mother. I’m wondering, in all your research, not just for this book, but your other book, “Rising,” did you ever have doubts about having kids? This is the fear, right, of the future – climate change is going to change the world and why bring kids into this world? What are your thoughts as you’re going through this journey?
Rush: Yeah, I don’t want to say this entirely, but almost anyone of my generation, if you’re not thinking about what impact is climate change going to have on my children and what impact are my children going to have on climate change, you’re kind of living with your head in the sand. Many people are thinking about those kind of twin risks as it relates to future generations.
Of course I’ve had doubts about having children, and yet I think the single thing that really helped move me away from a place of environmental guilt and feeling a certain sort of fear that having a child was a selfish choice was finding out that BP popularized the carbon footprint in 2005, and that all of those kinds of calculations that we do – like should I be a vegan or fly less or get a Prius or a Jetta – that kind of focus on individual consumer choices as the primary method to combat accelerated human-caused climate change is a logic that the fossil fuel companies developed and kind of drilled into us in the mid-2000s.
Ever since then, I think we get really focused on our individual choices, and you often see kids in those pie charts as the single worst thing you can do for the climate future. I just want to say to the fossil fuel industry, “Get out of my uterus. You’re like not allowed to make that decision for me or influence it in this way.” So as I found out that piece of information, I think a lot of my guilt that I had carried around went away.
Hernandez: Are you an optimist?
Rush: I would say I am an optimist.
Hernandez: How about the future? Has it changed at all [since] before you had kids?
Rush: The honest answer is, I think my brain chemistry is such that I tend to err on the side of optimism. I have a three-year-old now and I have another baby on the way and even during the three years of Nico’s life, the way I imagine the future has become more complicated, in part because I don’t think we’re making enough change fast enough to combat the worst early impacts of climate change. In that sense, I think I may be a realist, but I wake up with a smile on my face because I think the brain chemicals I have are pretty good.
Hernandez: Elizabeth Rush, author of “The Quickening,” the first book in The Public’s Radio book club. Again, to find out more, go to thepublicsradio.org/book club. Find us on our Facebook group. Check out the book. It’s a fantastic read. I actually do want to go to Antarctica. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance, but at least I got to through you. I’ve lived vicariously through you. Elizabeth, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Rush: Thanks for having me.
