A team of 10 drilling personnel and roughly 17 tons of equipment reached the top of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier on Monday, according to The New York Times, which embedded with the expedition. The group's goal is to plant scientific instruments into the glacier and the ocean water beneath it over the next few days.
Helicopters airlifted the researchers and their gear 19 miles to the outpost site during a rare break in the weather, the Times reported. Two helicopters flew a dozen cargo loads from the team's icebreaker ship to the camp, while glacial scientists and engineers erected a small tent city with bathrooms, generators and a mess hall.
The camp is rudimentary. The Times described the bathrooms as simple outhouses drilled into the snow and the dining tent as equipped with a basic air fryer and bread machine. Most food consists of "low-effort meals" such as freeze-dried fajita bowls and premade soup, though a cooler of frozen meat and vegetables was buried in the snow.
A Narrow Window Before the Ship Departs
The ship that carried the team to Thwaites must leave for another trek in a few weeks, so the drilling crew has to vacate the glacier by Feb. 7. Before then, they hope to deposit monitoring equipment into ocean water half a mile below their feet. If successful, scientists could remotely collect temperature data on waters thought to be contributing to the thinning ice shelf.
Glaciologists have watched Thwaites melt at a rate two to three times faster than expected in recent years. Experts fear that the glacier's destruction — it is known among scientists as the "Doomsday Glacier" — could have catastrophic effects on sea levels and coastlines worldwide.
"We're very lucky to be here; we also work very hard to be here," Scott Polfrey, a mechanical engineer at the British Antarctic Survey, told the Times. "It's important for everybody here that we do things safely and we come home with hopefully some hard-hitting scientific results that speak about our planet."
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