Thwaites

Thwaites Glacier Field Camp

Conditions:  Temperature 27°F (15°F with windchill).  Mostly cloudy.  Population = 915

We have been holed up at McMurdo recently with no planes flying, largely due to weather--either too warm and sunny with the ice not amenable to planes landing, or too blizzardy with visibility and wind prohibitive. The planes also continue to break.  Shawn, who went out on a medevac over a week ago (with my phone) and Crystal, the flight nurse who went out on Tuesday, are basking in the New Zealand summer while we are sitting in a stalled low-pressure zone.  Despite the snow and high winds, USAP put on #2 in its race series--a 10K--this morning.  I couldn't get myself out the door.   I rationalized that my clothes were not quite right for the task of running on hills of snow-covered ice with the wind blowing at 20 knots into my face.  For some reason, I preferred hunkering down in bed watching a movie while sipping a cup of Peet's coffee (the four pounds I ordered in August finally arrived).

The weather has been a huge struggle for the NSF.  WAIS Divide (see map below), the central hub for many field camps, is minimally staffed; their physician's assistant, Chris, has been hanging out with us for one month waiting for a flight.  Even the field camps that are occupied have been struggling with wind and snow.  I talk with most of the field managers at their weekly medical check in and learn more about their card games than about their experiments. 

The NSF's ginormous study--the Thwaites Glacier project (recommend clicking on link) -- has been languishing without personnel and equipment.  Thwaites, otherwise known as ICTG (the International Thwaits Glacier Collaboration), is an international collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and a bit with Korea, Germany and Sweden.

Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of the most unstable glaciers in the world.  Unstable--according to  David Vaughan, OBE, the Director of Science for Thwaites who lectured to us last night--means that small disruptions can ultimately lead to a major collapse.  Thwaites, in particular, drains a huge sloping area of the continent called the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).  If the bottom of the glacier melts and slips away, the entire sheet above it may slide down into the sea, an expanse of glacial ice the size of the UK.

The two modeling studies, PROPHET and DOMINOS are shown as open circles in orange. TIME is a study of how the boundary of the glacier evolves, and what the differences are between the slow-moving ice and underlying rock outside the glacier is versus the interior. GHOST is a traverse of the core of the glacier, looking at ice and bedrock characteristics with seismic and radar data. GHC will collect rock samples from either side of Thwaites Glacier to look for clues as to its recent past history—as will the THOR project, using marine sediments, bathymetric mapping, and oceanography. MELT and TARSAN both have a focus on the ice-ocean interaction at the point of contact between land, ice, and sea, looking at ocean circulation and rates of ice melt near the front of the glacier. 

The ITCG mission, then, resolves to understand how disruption of the Thwaites glacier will affect sea levels.  To do this, they will drill through the floating ice at the edge of the ice sheet, install instrumentation to measure the ocean, and use seismic and radar systems to map the ice thickness and the cavity beneath the ice. They will collect sample sediment cores from the sub-ice seabed and  rock samples from nearby mountains to examine the past history of the ice sheet. Farther upstream, another field team will investigate the boundary between the fast-flowing ice of Thwaites Glacier and the near-stationary ice next to it.

Vaughan emphasized that the one meter rise in sea level that they anticipate happening over the next century will have little consequence on an average day.  Storm surges are another matter.  The one in a 1000 year storm will become a one in ten year storm and these will be devastating, particularly to coastal cities.  Giving governments the information they need to prepare for those inevitable floods is an important Thwaites objective.

Click on picture to get more details of Thwaites technologies

Unfortunately, Thwaites Glacier happens to be in one of the most forbidding parts of the continent, in an area where research was long considered impossible due to weather and rough terrain.  Most of the one hundred scientists from ICTG who were scheduled to be in the field from November 9, 2019 through January 20, 2020 have become barflies in McMurdo's three drinking establishments, lamenting the daily push-pull of the airfield's go--no-go.  It's pitiable.  They dutifully get up at 4:00 AM, having schlepped their luggage to the transport area the night before, expecting to get on a 8:00 AM flight--a flight that is then delayed by two hours over and over and over again throughout the day.  Finally, late in the evening, the flight will be cancelled entirely.  Repeat that routine day after day, week after week, and you'd be drinking, too.  Tonight in the galley, we named the consequent syndrome of quiet desperation "Muldoonism" after our PA. In a brief chat with NSF leadership, it appears some projects may simply be put on hold until next year.  People may just be sent home, having spent their entire fall waiting for the Godot of airplanes

The most popular part of Dr. Vaughan's hour-long lecture, which was overall quite good, came in the one minute central interlude when he showed us six pictures of his mischievous cat.  McMurdians are so starved for their pets that I think most would have preferred a lecture with 59 minutes of cat and only one of global catastrophe in the making.

Not Vaughan's cat.