The Great Melt E-Book

Alister Doyle

• Herausgeber: Flint
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 402

Beschreibung

The time for action is now. The fate of the world's coasts rests on a knife edge as global warming melts ice sheets and glaciers from the Alps to the Andes. The choices we make now will determine whether oceans rise by a coast-swamping 1 metre by 2100 or whether we can save our coastal communities. From the glaciers of Antarctica and the high Andes, to the small island states of the Pacific and the coastal cities of Miami, New York, Venice and Rotterdam – Alister Doyle tracks the thaw that threatens life as we know it, shining a light on the most vulnerable people at the shoreline who are already moving inland, on the scientists puzzling about what is going on, and on the ideas about how to limit the damage.

Leseprobe

For Siv, Emmaand Matias

First published 2021

FLINT is an imprint of The History Press

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© Alister Doyle 2021

The right of Alister Doyle to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Christiana Figueres

Journeys into the Frontlines of Climate Change

1 In Antarctica, the Giant Stirs

2 In Fiji: One Man, Three Homes

3 An Andean Glacier Is Melting: See You in Court

4 In Monaco, Superyachts and Sea Level Rise

5 Future Migration: A Flawed Pacific Guide

6 In the Caribbean, the Dream of Higher Ground

7 Seal Rocks and Ancient Oaks: The Mystery of the Falling Baltic Sea

8 Iceland’s Glaciers: A Requiem for Ice

9 Fighting Sea Level Rise: Build a Wall, or Maybe a Sandcastle?

10 “Climate Refugees?” A Pacific Quest May Open the Way

Epilogue: 28 Trillion Tonnes of Ice

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

FOREWORD

BY CHRISTIANA FIGUERES

IN 1962, AN AMERICAN OIL company proudly told readers of Life Magazine that it “supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier” every day.

“This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries,” Humble Oil said in an advertisement by a photo of a frozen river of ice in Alaska. It described how the firm “provides energy in many forms – to help heat our homes, power our transportation and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals”.

How times have changed since that two-page boast about the power of human ingenuity to alter the natural world was published, in an edition of Life that featured astronaut John Glenn on the cover.

We now know that greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels in factories, cars and power plants are the main driver of an accelerating rise in temperatures that scientists estimate is thawing a staggering 2 billion tonnes of ice on land every day, from Greenland to Antarctica.

That meltwater is cascading into the oceans and raising sea levels – in the worst case by 7 metres by 2300 that would swamp coasts from Bangladesh to Miami, and entire low-lying nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, forcing tens if not hundreds of millions of people to leave their homes and migrate to what will most likely be unwelcoming regions.

In The Great Melt, Alister Doyle gives voice to people living on the frontlines of climate change, as it is happening right now, in a stark reminder that we are at a crossroads in the climate crisis. The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leaves no doubt that this is the decisive decade for humankind in which we need to halve emissions by 2030 from 2010 levels to avoid the worst impacts of warming.

Alister visits a Fijian family who have moved inland – not once, but twice – to escape rising seas. In Iceland, a poet is struggling with the loss of glaciers that she thought were “emblems of eternity”. In Panama, a man is alarmed by seeing sardines swimming in his house during a storm surge. In Florida, a teenage activist is trying to use the courts to avert what could be a metre of sea level rise during his lifetime. Alister also flies with British scientists to land on a part of Antarctica – the Wilkins Ice Shelf – that has since shattered and vanished in the Southern Ocean. These personal stories are juxtaposed with the latest science to create a powerful base of evidence for urgent action to avert further suffering.

I was Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 to 2016, during most of that time we worked toward the Paris Agreement after the debacle of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. In The Future We Choose, the 2020 book I wrote with my friend and colleague Tom Rivett-Carnac, we warn of the apocalyptic risks of sea level rise if we fail to achieve the Paris goals of limiting rising temperatures. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, for instance, we imagine coastal mega-cities as “ghostly Atlantises dotting the coasts of each continent, their skyscrapers jutting out of the water, their people evacuated or dead”. But we are not condemned to this devastation. As The Great Melt also underscores, it is not too late: we can not only survive the climate crisis, we can thrive in the better world we intentionally, but urgently, create.

I have appreciated Alister’s excellent coverage of UN negotiations on climate change for almost two decades, mostly in his former job as environment correspondent at Reuters. We have met in places from Lima to Paris, from Geneva to Cancun, often in conference halls where governments hammer out legal texts meant to safeguard the planet and the most vulnerable people on the frontlines.

There are many reasons for both outrage and optimism. Outrage at the slow pace of action and the rapid pace of destruction, optimism because many things are changing – we have the blueprint for action in the 2015 Paris Agreement and most of the world’s population now lives in nations with targets for net zero emissions, often by mid-century. Governments, businesses, investors, voters and young people are becoming ever more aware of the need to act.

As we seek a greener economic future after the coronavirus pandemic, the pace of the melt of glaciers in coming decades will be one of the clearest gauges of our success or failure in fighting global warming. This book is an innovative wake-up call for action from the fragile frontlines.

Christiana Figueres

Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on ClimateChange, 2010–16, Co-Founder of Global Optimism

August 2021

JOURNEYS INTO THE FRONTLINES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

ON A BEACH IN EASTERN Fiji shaded by coconut palms, the chief of the local village stands dejectedly beside rotting wooden stumps and a lump of concrete jutting out of the sand. “This is my house,” Simione Botu, a stocky man in his early sixties, tells me with a shrug. Living on a frontline of climate change, this is all that remains of his boyhood home by the Pacific Ocean, washed away decades ago.

In a world where sea level rise driven by global warming is melting ever more ice from Antarctica to Greenland and threatens cities from San Francisco to Shanghai, Botu and his family are among a vanishingly small group: double victims forced to rebuild their homes inland not just once, but twice.

After storm surges wrecked his childhood home near the mouth of a meandering river, Botu built a new one-storey home 50 metres inland. But makeshift sea walls failed, and the water followed, damaging the wooden foundations. In 2014 the Fijian government, with rare foresight, relocated his entire village of 150 people to new blue-painted homes, on a hillside more than 1km inland.

On the other side of the world, where the coast of Florida gets flooded when hurricanes whip up the Atlantic Ocean, Levi Draheim tells me he feels “sadness and anger” that his young sister will inherit a planet where the seas could rise by a metre this century. He has already had to wade in water up to his knees when his home was flooded. “I want to be able to tell her that I did everything I can to fight these horrible things that we are inheriting,” he said. His compassion is striking: when we talk in 2021, Draheim is aged 13 and his sister, Juniper, a nine-month-old infant. Levi Draheim is a plaintiff in a lawsuit trying to force Florida to take far more action to cut fossil fuel use. He is part of a global surge of activism by young people, largely inspired by Sweden’s Greta Thunberg and her #FridaysforFuture movement.

And alarm about climate change is rising. In the starkest warning to date about climate change, top scientists and governments issued a UN report in August 20211 that UN Secretary-General António Guterres called “code red for humanity”.2

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s most authoritative guide to global warming comprising both governments and scientists, concluded for the first time that the evidence is “unequivocal” – beyond a shadow of doubt – that humans are to blame for global warming that is causing fiercer heatwaves, downpours, wildfires and a thaw of ice that is driving up the oceans.

For many people alive today, sea level rise seems a distant threat, beyond the lifetimes of current policymakers. And yet many living today are already suffering the consequences of a global increase of the oceans, of about 20cm since 1900. And Juniper Draheim will be 79 on New Year’s Day in 2100.

Botu and Draheim are among the people living on the frontlines of climate change who have helped me to write this book, based on visits to places including Antarctica, Peru, Panama, Fiji, the Netherlands, Britain and Sweden, backed up with calls during the pandemic. The Great Melt is meant to offer a snapshot of how people on the frontlines are managing the crisis of melting ice and sea level rise, with both successes and failures.

I set out trying to understand: when seas are rising worldwide, why are some people much more at risk than others? How much will seas rise this century, and beyond? Other than cutting greenhouse gas emissions, how do you protect a coastline? How do people make the agonising decision to move inland, in some cases leaving behind the graves of their ancestors? Can you go to court to blame someone? Can you be a ‘climate refugee’? Can a low-lying island nation continue to exist if it disappears beneath the waves, like a modern-day Atlantis?

Along the way are tales of resilience. An elderly Panamanian man, who wants to move to the mainland from a low-lying island, laughs when he recounts his dismay at seeing sardines swimming in his home during a tropical storm sweeping the Caribbean. An Icelandic poet bemoans the accelerating loss of a glacier that she remembers as an “emblem of eternity” when she led cows past the ice to summer pastures as a girl. In Peru, I meet a mountain guide who is suing a German power company on the other side of the world. He blames the company for contributing to glacier melt high in the Andes, threatening a mudslide that could wipe away his family home. In Fiji in the South Pacific Ocean, I meet people torn between two identities after their parents and grandparents were forcibly relocated in 1945 from an island 2,000km away after it was ruined by British phosphate mining. The struggle by the displaced Banabans to secure rights in Fiji, such as land ownership and citizenship, is a rare, imperfect blueprint for future migration driven by climate change.

Apart from people living on the frontlines, I have spoken to scientists, lawyers, government officials, environmentalists, activists and artists trying to make sense of the bewildering melt. Dozens of people have generously given me their time.

Some climate sceptics say sea level rise is exaggerated: the sea is constantly shifting – the tides rise and fall, storms come and go, currents swirl. They might argue that the coastline by the white cliffs in what is now Kent in the south of England probably looks pretty much as it did when Julius Caesar invaded in 55BC, and that coasts subside because of natural geological forces and erosion, such as homes on islands in the Chesapeake Bay in the US abandoned a century ago.3 They could also point to cities such as Jakarta in Indonesia that are sinking as they suck water from aquifers deep below.

Yet a momentous change is under way in the oceans that cover 70 per cent of the planet’s surface – they are undoubtedly warming because of our greenhouse gas emissions. The waters are stirring as glaciers from the Alps to the Andes are melting and the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica thaw.

The centuries since Caesar invaded Britain marked a rare period of stability in sea levels4 during Earth’s history and allowed many civilisations to flourish by the coasts. That stability is ending, after the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century ushered in the increasing use of coal and other fossil fuels.

Annual sea level rise has surged to 3.7mm a year in recent years, more than double the average rate for the twentieth century, the IPCC report says.

The amounts of ice are mind-boggling: every mm of sea level rise is equivalent to melting an ice cube with sides about 7km long – roughly 360 billion tonnes of ice. Such an ice cube would be as tall as Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Andes. Scientists sometimes compare the impact of the Industrial Revolution to a mammoth hair dryer blowing hot air onto an ice cube.

The fate of the world’s coasts now rests on a knife edge. Choices made this decade at meetings including the global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021 (known as COP26), will determine whether the rise of the ocean remains within manageable limits in coming centuries, or redraws maps of the world.

But I’ve seen that happening already. In Antarctica, I accompanied scientists from the British Antarctic Survey to a part of the world that is no longer on the map – the Wilkins Ice Shelf broke up weeks after we landed in a tiny plane equipped with skis in a nail-biting flight in 2009.

Keep pumping ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the IPCC says, and a melt is likely to drive up sea levels by up to a metre by 2100 and by between 2 and 7 metres by 2300. Seven metres is taller than a giraffe, above the world record for the men’s pole vault, or about the height of a two-storey building. That Pandora’s Box future would swamp coastal areas from Bangladesh to Florida and entire island nations in the Pacific or Indian Oceans. But there is still hope. Act quickly now to limit greenhouse gas emissions, however, and seas might rise by in the best case by only about 30cm this century and less than a metre by 2300. That would be bad, but fixable.

Outside these core scenarios, however, seas could rise by almost two metres by 2100 in the unlikely case that Antarctica’s ice sheet starts to disintegrate, it says. And a disturbing note about “deep uncertainties” for 2300, says: “Sea level rise greater than 15 metres cannot be ruled out with high emissions.” In Washington DC, that would raise the Atlantic Ocean to the lawn of the White House. The report, by more than 200 scientists, is based on 14,000 scientific papers, and endorsed by governments.

Some are suggesting building new walls, perhaps dumping vast amounts of sand on the coastlines to protect cities, as is already happening in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, around the world, people on the frontlines face a host of legal difficulties: who will go where? Who will pay? Are women, young people and minorities getting enough say? The Great Melt is a stark reminder for a world struggling with Covid-19 that greenhouse gases, as invisible and as insidious as the virus, are an existential threat for coming centuries.

The idea for this book came from fifteen years working as environment correspondent, from 2004 to 2019, for Thomson Reuters. I attended dozens of climate conferences – including thirteen of the annual COPs in places from Milan to Bali, from Cancun to Nairobi. I heard low-lying island states, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, complain that big nations often dismissed their concerns about sea levels as affecting only a miniscule fraction of humanity. At a UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, for instance, Dessima Williams of the island nation of Grenada in the Caribbean berated the Danish organisers for hanging a huge globe, several metres across, in the cavernous conference centre. She was outraged because the black and white map was stylised and omitted islands smaller than about the size of Malta, meaning entire nations had vanished into oblivion in the blank ocean. One frustrated Pacific island delegate had added dots with a pencil and written in the name of his homeland – the Solomon Islands. “We need to be on that map,” Williams said.

So, I have made a point of trying to visit remote places, including some left off that Copenhagen map, to see how sea level rise is affecting lives there. Since Copenhagen, sea level rise has become a lot more urgent, with both rich and poor nations waking up to the risks and costs of losing coastlines.

“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable,” Guterres said of the IPCC’s findings. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet. There must be no new coal plants built after 2021.” He also wants governments, focused since 2020 on the coronavirus pandemic, to address climate change which he describes as “another, deep emergency”.

Guterres says governments should halve greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 levels by 2030, requiring cuts of 7.6 per cent a year throughout this decade, as we shift away from the fossil fuel economy. But climate action is a perplexing rollercoaster – news is sometimes inspiring, often depressing. And bold promises for cuts in emissions usually far outstrip action.

One major cause for optimism is that almost 200 governments adopted the historic Paris Agreement in 2015 to end the fossil fuel era this century, and President Joe Biden rejoined in 2021 after former President Donald Trump pulled out. The agreement seeks to limit global warming to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial times, while “pursuing efforts” for an even tougher goal of 1.5°C. Since that breakthrough, most of the world’s population lives in nations with a goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 or 2060. Equally important, prices of solar and wind power have plunged, and investors and companies are shifting to greener technologies, while youth activists and groups such as Extinction Rebellion have added pressure. In July 2021, the European Union policymakers laid out their boldest climate plan yet, overhauling everything from industry to shipping in order to slash EU emissions by 55 per cent from 1990 levels by 2030. In 2020, global emissions of carbon dioxide tumbled a record 6 per cent,5 the largest annual drop since the Second World War and close to the UN goal of 7.6 per cent every year this decade.

But the bad news is that emissions are expected to leap 5 per cent in 2021 as demand for coal, oil and gas rebounds. All the while, almost no politicians have legislated short-term goals to cut emissions in coming years to get on track for the Paris Agreement, and many corporate commitments to sustainability are hyperbolic. Meanwhile, 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record,6 along with 2016 and 2019, with temperatures about 1.2°C above pre-industrial times. Record heatwaves baked Canada and the United States in 2021, an event climate researchers called ‘virtually impossible’ without human-caused climate change.7 And deadly floods swamped parts of Europe, China and India. Elsewhere, devastating wildfires ravaged parts of Siberia, Greece and California and a heatwave dubbed “Lucifer” seared southern Italy.

Nowhere has the contrast between whether to act, dither or simply ignore climate change been starker than in the US – the world’s biggest economy and number two greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Biden pledged in 2021 to halve US emissions by 2030, from 2005 levels, and said it would help the economy. “For too long we’ve failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis: Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. For me, when I think climate change, I think jobs,” he told the US Congress.

But Washington has a whiplash history of climate policies. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said the US embrace of the Paris Agreement “is not the return of the King, rather it’s a truant getting back to class”. So, the outlook for sea levels is uncertain.

Trump, under whose leadership the US was the only nation to quit the 2015 agreement, once tweeted that a massive sea wall to protect New York from rare storms would be “a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea … Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!” By contrast in 2008, on securing the Democratic Party nomination to run for president, Barack Obama had expressed soaring hopes that “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.” Still, Biden’s plans are a huge cause for new hope.

“This is the decisive decade,” said Christiana Figueres, who was an architect of the Paris Agreement as the UN’s former climate chief. Biden’s plans “keep the 1.5°C goal alive for us. That is absolutely critical.” Laurence Tubiana, who also designed the Paris Agreement as France’s climate ambassador, welcomed Biden’s goals as a “huge leap” but said much more was needed by the whole world, including new funds for developing nations.

Despite decades of promises of more action, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have risen almost every year since 1990 (the baseline set at an Earth Summit attended by US Republican President George H.W. Bush). The consequences are ever more visible, from decaying coral reefs to loss of forests and wildlife, as the planet heats up.

The big worries are the ice sheets in a warming world. Antarctica contains enough ice to drive up sea levels by 58 metres and Greenland locks up the equivalent of 7 metres. There are alarming hints that an ‘irreversible’ melt may already be under way. But to truly understand the context of this melt, we have to go back in time.

SEA LEVEL RISE: AN OLD STORY

For much of history, changes in sea levels have been an almost constant feature of lives along the coasts – but the last 2,000 years have been exceptionally stable.

In the biblical story of Noah’s Ark – echoing the flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh in ancient Mesopotamia – God sends rains that swamp most of the planet. Noah builds a vast ark to save his family and pairs of each type of creature to ensure a new start for life on Earth.

Sea levels have risen about 120 metres in the past 20,000 years, as the Ice Age loosened its grip. A vast pile of sand dredged up from the North Sea to reinforce a beach in the Netherlands, for instance, contains fossils of mammoths and deer – relics of a time when the region was dry land and Britain was connected to continental Europe.

Seas are rising almost everywhere, but I also visit parts of Scandinavia where they are falling relative to the land. Along the Baltic Sea, the coast is rebounding since the end of the Ice Age lifted a vast frozen weight off the land, like a huge foam mattress that takes a while to reshape after you get up. The Great Melt uncovers a detective story dating back to the eighteenth century about how scientists solved a mystery of the falling level of the Baltic Sea, helped by Swedish ‘seal rocks’ and an ancient oak tree, still standing near Stockholm.

In this book, I have tried to look around the globe to highlight the harrowing choices faced by those on the frontline of climate change. It’s involved a lot of travel, by air, buses, trucks, trains, cars and on foot: I have bought offsets for the carbon emissions and hope this book justifies the pollution.

Beyond the suffering of people on the front lines who will be forced to move, Anders Levermann, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Columbia University, said that several metres of sea level rise would also imperil many of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements, from Venice to Sydney, from Beijing to London. “So many cities will be seriously threatened … It’s a threat to our cultural heritage,” he said.

Asked about the major events of the twentieth century in opinion polls, people in Western nations often mention events such as the Second World War, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s landing on the Moon, votes for women, the Holocaust, or the atom bomb. Ask the same question in the year 2300 and, in the worst case, people may well remember our generation for the climate crisis and how we redrew maps of the planet as the seas rose. We can still avert the worst legacy of sea level rise. Future generations would not forgive us a nation-swamping 7 metres.

1

IN ANTARCTICA, THE GIANT STIRS

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound!

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834)

Around the fringes of Antarctica, by far the biggest store of ice on the planet, glaciers are showing signs of an ‘irreversible’ melt that could swamp the world’s coasts. The focus of research is on a huge ‘doomsday glacier’, the Thwaites, after the break-up of ice shelves, including the Wilkins, to the north. Scientists, and other staff including cooks, pilots and electricians, are devoting their careers to understanding a continent that could be a frozen ‘time bomb’ for sea level rise.

A BUZZER SOUNDS IN THE tiny red plane as it swoops down to land on the Wilkins Ice Shelf off Antarctica, unnerving the first – and only – visitors to a part of the world that has since vanished off the map in a chaos of icebergs.

Seals lolling on the sea ice look up as we pass above them, mystified by the whirr of what is almost certainly the only thing they’ve ever seen flying apart from birds. ‘Remote’ hardly captures how far this white slab of ice is from civilisation – the nearest town is Punta Arenas in Chile more than 2,000km to the north, beyond the stormy Southern Ocean.

As the alarm sounds, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and we two reporters aboard brace for the worst: I grip the metal frames of the bare-bones seat of the Twin Otter plane, equipped with skis as well as wheels, enabling it to land and take off almost anywhere, sliding over ice or bumping on a dirt runway.

We’ve flown 300km over the jagged mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula (one of the fastest-warming places on Earth), which snakes up towards South America, and then out over the collapsing Wilkins Ice Shelf. Here, ice chunks bigger than city blocks lie entombed in a frozen sea.

There are no landing strips, just endless white. And the unexpected buzzer makes things a lot worse. Why did my Thomson Reuters video colleague Stuart McDill, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, and I accept this assignment? I look over at Canadian pilot Steve King, luckily he’s not freaking out and looks reassuringly concentrated despite the alarm. A second or two after the buzzer sounds, the skis touch down gently on flat, slushy snow and ice and the plane slithers to a halt. He turns off the twin propellers, clicks a few buttons on the dashboard above his head and climbs out of the plane in his red jumpsuit and blinks into the hazy sunshine.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you beforehand about the buzzer?” he chirpily asks as we passengers clamber down the ladder onto the bright ice. I’m still shaky when he tells us the alarm just before landing is a badge of honour for polar pilots – a warning that the plane has slowed to stall speed of about 105km per hour – meaning it is going to fall out of the sky. That sounds a daft goal for a pilot, but there is a safety logic. The sluggish speed meant the plane would travel a minimum distance before coming to a halt, reducing risks that it might fall into a hidden crevasse, the main worry for landing on unknown ice and snow. So, for King, the buzzer going off just as we landed was a stroke of aviation magic.

As the propellors spin to a stop, the silence takes over on a near-windless day by the Southern Ocean. No one has ever been to this spot before – and no one will ever come back. No one knew at the time in January 2009, but this part of the ice shelf was weeks away from breaking up for good in April into massive icebergs, probably after being in place for thousands of years. Now the region is open water in the brief Antarctic summers.

The scientists have come here because ice shelves, vast tongues of ice floating on the sea around much of Antarctica, hold huge clues to predicting sea level rise that threatens places from New York to Buenos Aires and coastlines from Pacific islands to Bangladesh. When we visit, the Wilkins Ice Shelf covers an area about the size of Jamaica.

McDill and I visited the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Base for two weeks, a rare insight not only into the science but also the human side of life underpinning research in Antarctica. That landing was a fairly routine day for staff in a place where scientists expose themselves to risks – ranging from engine failures to crevasses – to help understand the world’s biggest deep freeze.

Overall, Antarctica is the size of the US and Mexico combined and contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by about 58 metres if it ever all melted.1 Scientists say there are more signs that Antarctica is thawing at the edges and, most alarmingly, that an ‘irreversible’ melt might already be under way.

Antarctica is divided into two main parts, East and West, each with its own risks. East Antarctica, the giant taking up most of the continent, has the coldest and most stable ice sheet, locking up more than 90 per cent of the ice. West Antarctica, which includes the Antarctic Peninsula and the Wilkins Ice Shelf, is the most vulnerable to a thaw.

A decade ago, the Wilkins was the focus of research but during the 2020s, scientists have shifted attention south, to the even more remote region of the Thwaites glacier. It’s sometimes called the ‘doomsday glacier’, the widest glacier on earth at 120km across where it meets the ocean. The worry is that a collapse of the Thwaites could be the first domino to fall on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, unleashing a flow of ice pent up inland that could lead to sea level rise of 3.3 metres2 over centuries, or millennia. And the risks are growing – a bit like on our plane, the scientific alarm buzzer is ever shriller.

As previously noted, the UN’s expert group, the IPCC, said in August 20213 that global sea levels are likely to rise by up to about a metre this century if man-made greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. The report includes dire warnings about the thaw under way in Greenland and Antarctica. Even if global warming is limited to the goals of Paris Agreement, it says “there is limited evidence that the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets will be lost almost completely and irreversibly over multiple millennia”. Irreversible is, of course, planet changing.

On the worst trajectory of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels are likely to rise by between about two and seven metres by 2300, it said. That is above the upper bound of 5.4 metres considered in a 2019 report, based on a slightly different scenario. Radical action now to limit greenhouse gas emissions and promote a more sustainable economy could curb the rise in sea levels, in the best case, to less than a metre by 2300, the 2021 report says. But scientists are unable to predict with any degree of precision what will happen to ice sheets in a warming world. All the IPCC scenarios for rising oceans have huge ranges, especially beyond the next few decades.4 Much of the increased risk seen by the IPCC this century is driven by Antarctica – every extra centimetre of meltwater makes floods more frequent in low-lying regions where tens of millions of people live. At the other end of the planet, Greenland is also pouring water into the ocean, threatening coasts and cities.

“Not keeping to the Paris climate agreement really commits cities to the sea,” climate scientist Anders Levermann tells me. “And in 2300 sea level rise is not done. It’s going to continue.” He says that the world is still far from understanding the risks of what is happening in Antarctica. There may still be ‘unknown unknowns’ – unexpected processes scientists have yet to imagine – about ice sheets.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments promised to limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial times while pursuing efforts for a 1.5°C maximum, but even such rises in temperatures could be the tripwire for a meltdown of ice sheets.

Sea levels are condemned to rise in the very long term even if governments meet the Paris targets, partly because of instabilities in Greenland and Antarctica, the IPCC said in 2021.5 “Over the next 2,000 years, global mean sea level will rise by about 2 to 3 metres if warming is limited to 1.5°C,” the IPCC said, and by 2–6 metres with 2°C of warming.6 Bear in mind that temperatures are already up about 1.2°C.

David Vaughan, Director of Science at the British Antarctic Survey who led our flight to the Wilkins, says research is likely to stay in West Antarctica, especially to understand warmer ocean waters that are gnawing away at the ice from below. “The West Antarctic Ice Sheet – Thwaites, Pine island and a few other small glaciers – is where we should be working. They are the biggest uncertainty about sea level rise. I can’t see that focus changing in the next few years,” he told me in 2021.

He laughs when we reminisce over that day on the Wilkins – especially the risky timing of landing on a place that turned out to be about to disappear off the map.

After getting out of the Twin Otter plane on the Wilkins, Vaughan beams and starts jumping up and down on the slushy snow and ice, dancing for joy like a kid. “This is amazing!” he exults, a switch from the eminent professor we’ve got to know back at the scientific base. My colleague McDill jokes that it may be unwise to jump up and down on a collapsing ice shelf. But Vaughan, who has spent most of the flight studying the shattered ice out of the window, knows we’re no more than ants on a skyscraper.

On the flight from the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Base we’ve even passed over the eponymous Vaughan Inlet on the Antarctic Peninsula – the continent is so little known that places are sometimes named after people who are working here today. The Vaughan Inlet, honouring David’s work on the break-up of Antarctica’s ice, is near a place called Shiver Point.

From the sky, the Wilkins looks like a giant has angrily emptied out a jigsaw puzzle, his brain numbed by the jumble of white and bluish pieces, to create a senseless clutter. Or it’s like someone has dropped a massive wedding cake and shattered icing is everywhere. There’s no way of easily gauging the scale, there are no buildings or trees to give a sense of size in Antarctica, in fact there are only a few colours: black rocks, white ice and blue sky and water. Many of the chunks of ice we see are bigger than the Empire State building in New York or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, lying on their sides. The only sense of perspective when we fly low has come from the small black dots on the sea ice – up closer we see they are seals in the sunshine on a windless day, craning their necks.

Vaughan explains to us that glaciers are giant rivers of ice, built up from snowfall. In permanently frozen regions like most of Antarctica, fresh snow weighs down on older layers below, crushing snowflakes and squeezing out air to form solid ice that becomes a glacier. Gravity draws the glacier downhill towards the sea – often meandering like a slow-motion river or icy serpent. When the glacier reaches the sea, it can break up or, in some cases, keep flowing outwards to form a tongue of ice floating on the water – an ice shelf like the Wilkins that can be hundreds of metres thick. At the outer edge of ice shelves, chunks eventually snap off into the sea as icebergs. It’s all a natural process, but global warming is accelerating the slide. The Wilkins Ice Shelf juts about 20 metres above the sea with the rest under water – like an iceberg with only the tip showing.

The increasing worry among Antarctic scientists is that ice shelves act as natural brakes that hold back large amounts of ice inland, slowing the flow of the ice sheets towards the ocean. The Wilkins holds back ice equivalent to about 1cm of sea level rise if it all melted, tiny compared to the Thwaites.

Glaciologists have come up with an array of imaginative analogies to explain what’s going on with ice shelves. In the worst case, some glaciologists fear Antarctica’s ice, which is 4,776 metres deep at its thickest point,7 is like a gigantic wine bottle lying on its side, with the ice shelves acting as the cork. When the cork fits tight, everything’s fine. Remove the cork, however, and almost immediately the whole bottle starts to gurgle out.

Others compare Antarctica to a Gothic cathedral – a building whose weight squeezes the walls outwards and needs extra support from the sides, or flying buttresses, to prevent collapse. Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, told a US Congressional committee in 2019:8 “Some early Gothic cathedrals suffered from the ‘spreading-pile’ problem, in which the sides tended to bulge out while the roof sagged down, with potentially unpleasant consequences. The beautiful solution was the flying buttress, which transfers some of the spreading tendency to the strong earth beyond the cathedral. Ice sheets also have ‘flying buttresses’, called ice shelves.”

Less poetically, he and others also compare the Antarctic ice to a lump of pancake batter – when it’s cold, it’s a stable lump. Heat it in a frying pan and it will quickly splay out.

Among other explanations, the Earth Institute at Columbia University says that land-bound glaciers behind ice shelves are like people jostling for space. Glaciers “are constantly pushing seaward. But because many shelves are largely confined within expansive bays and gulfs, they are compressed from the sides and slow the glaciers’ march – somewhat like a person in a narrow hallway bracing their arms against the walls to slow someone trying to push past them”.9

Ice shelves themselves don’t add to sea level rise when they break up – they are already part of the ocean floating on the water. But it is their effect in releasing the pent-up ice behind them that can make a massive difference. Since Antarctica’s ice is so vast, even small changes around the edges need to be monitored because they can affect coasts around the world. Relatively speaking, the ice here dwarfs mountain glaciers from the Andes to the Himalayas. In addition, about 75 per cent of Antarctica’s coast has ice shelves10 extending offshore – the largest, the Ronne-Filchner, covers an area a bit smaller than Spain. Other large shelves are Ross and McMurdo. So that’s why we flew to the Wilkins for a first-hand view.

In the early 1990s, the Wilkins Ice Shelf covered about 17,400 sq km, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.11 At the time of our visit, it’s shrunk to 10,300 sq km, after repeated collapses in a warming world. Large parts of eight other smaller shelves around the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula have already broken up.

By the time we are there on the Wilkins, the British Antarctic Survey reckons that a total of 25,000 sq km of ice shelf has been lost from around the Antarctic Peninsula since the 1950s. That lost area is bigger than Israel or roughly the same size as the US state of Vermont.

It’s January 2009 and just past midsummer in the southern hemisphere – the spot we’ve just landed on is a 40km long ‘ice bridge’ of the Wilkins Ice Shelf connecting mainland Antarctica to Charcot Island offshore to the west. Break-ups of the shelf mean this ice bridge is about 500 metres wide in 2009 at the narrowest, down from tens of kilometres in the early 1990s. In satellite pictures at the time, the Wilkins ice bridge looked like a jagged sliver from Charcot Island pinning the bulk of the ice shelf against the coast of Antarctica. A year earlier, in 2008, the British Antarctic Survey flew down here, without landing, and took dramatic pictures of the thinning ice bridge that were broadcast worldwide. It concluded that the Wilkins was “hanging by a thread”.12

My colleague McDill sets up his tripod and camera on the ice and Vaughan steps up. “We’ve come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes,” Vaughan says. “It really could go at any minute.” After the 2008 British Antarctic Survey flight, “miraculously we’ve come back a summer later and it’s still here. If it was hanging by a thread last year, it’s hanging by a filament this year.”

He tells everyone that we shouldn’t linger – and correctly predicts that the shelf is likely to break up in coming weeks or months. As part of the trip, Vaughan and colleagues slot together what becomes a 4-metre pole topped by a GPS satellite transmitter to be stuck into the ice for a Dutch-led experiment to detect movements in the shelf. It will give hints to movements that could herald a collapse, caused by winds or ocean currents. Having assembled the pole, Vaughan pulls out a tiny strip of paper that will connect the battery and activate the GPS. He does so and the GPS pole starts bleeping.

Good, it seems to be working. But after about a minute, the bleeps abruptly stop and there’s no other sign of life from the pole. This starts a debate among the scientists: yes, it’s probably working perfectly and was programmed to bleep only for a few seconds to show it was okay. But what if the battery has slipped out of place, or the GPS is broken and this part of the trip is in vain? No one knows – there are no written instructions, and no mobile phone, satellite phone or radio connection to check with the Dutch scientists back at the Rothera Base 300km away. The scientists do the usual things when something like a TV remote control doesn’t work back home – shake it, take the battery out and put it in again, knock it a couple of times. It doesn’t make a difference. The beeps don’t resume. Vaughan rightly concludes that it’s working – endless bleeping would be a pointless waste of energy with only the odd passing Antarctic skua – an often-aggressive, seagull-sized brown bird – likely ever to hear it.

While on the ice, King, the pilot, advises passengers to stay near the plane – walking anywhere is a risk because there might be treacherous fissures.

McDill does a memorable piece to camera about landing in a spot never visited before and we all take photos to capture the moment. Afterwards, however, they look unremarkable – the background is just a flat, continuous white of snow beneath a blue sky mottled with clouds, all as if taken on an empty plain – no ice cliffs, no sea, no drama.

King shepherds everyone back aboard, again warning that you never know when this place might shatter. We take off and he flies nerve-janglingly low, skimming over the frozen sea to give McDill a view for taking video – sometimes even below the flat top of the ice shelf, which is only about 20 metres above the ocean. And a bit later, flying along a several kilometre-long crack between two massive chunks of the ice shelf, the wings seem to be almost touching the sides.

McDill films from the co-pilot’s seat beside King – I’m impressed his nerves are steady enough. Viewing it later, scientists say it’s like the Star Wars movie A New Hope when Luke Skywalker skims low above the Death Star.

“Just another day cheatin’ death,” King remarks wryly at one point.

The Twin Otter, a Canadian-built de Havilland plane, is a workhorse in Antarctica. With a wingspan of about 20 metres and an ability to accelerate and take off within about 400 metres, every kilo counts. No one takes flying lightly – danger is everywhere in Antarctica.

Among other ice shelves that have broken up on the Antarctic Peninsula are the George VI – named after the late British King and father of Queen Elizabeth – or the Prince Gustav, named after the man who became king of Sweden in 1907. Antarctica’s names, a snapshot of history in the early twentieth century, underscore the isolation of the continent, and the difficulty of knowing how it might melt.

The continent was sighted13 in 1820, by Russian, British and American expeditions, meaning many names date from around then, with a mixture of royalty and explorers and competing claims – Argentina, Britain and Chile all have overlapping stakes to territory on the Antarctic Peninsula, ‘frozen’ under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty which says the continent belongs to no one. An era of exploration followed the early whaling pioneers. Norwegian Roald Amundsen was first to reach the South Pole in December 1911, a month before Briton Robert Falcon Scott and four companions. Scott and his men, trapped for days in a tent in a blizzard and suffering from hunger, exhaustion and frostbite, died on the return journey.

The Wilkins itself is named after Australian George Hubert Wilkins, an early Antarctic aviator and explorer of both poles. A year after he died, aged 70 in 1958, the US Navy scattered his ashes at the North Pole.

The problem for understanding the risks is that Antarctica’s thaw is seen by so few. It’s hard to grasp one of the most alarming effects of man-made global warming caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions from cars, factories and power plants when it is thousands of kilometres away. Similarly, the historic nature and the sense of such giant markers in the landscape being immutable makes the concept of change hard to fathom.

Ice shelves have indeed been around a long time. A study of ocean sediments beneath one of the collapsed Larsen ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, for instance, found no recent traces in the seabed of algae – tiny marine plants – that require sunlight to grow. That indicated that the ice had been in place, blocking sunlight, for at least 10,000 years. Those Larsen shelves are named after a Norwegian whaler who sailed perilously far south in the late nineteenth century.

But the loss of ice shelves is already changing the maps of Antarctica. After taking off from the Wilkins, we fly with the Twin Otter for three more stops to allow British scientist Alison Cook to update maps made in 1975 by the US Geological Survey, before the satellite and GPS age allowed far greater precision. She’s checking and updating GPS coordinates – and also doing her bit to reduce a gender imbalance in Antarctic science where work on the continent has been mostly done by men.