Peter Neff was not going to see his mission done in by a balky generator. Neff, accompanied by doctoral student Julia Andreasen and engineer Etienne Gros, was working on the Canisteo peninsula in Antarctica in January 2024—a location considered remote even by the standards of the globe’s coldest continent.

The team, along with a group of South Korean polar researchers conducting their own mission, had been airlifted by helicopter from an icebreaker to the worksite, which was otherwise unreachable. (The Korean Polar Research Institute provided logistics and funds for Neff’s expedition, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation.)

Neff’s project involved taking ice cores with a generator-powered drill. Unfortunately, both the main and backup generators were malfunctioning, and soon the helicopters would return to pick up the teams and their glacial artifacts.

Without a working generator, the research was over. The flummoxed trio then did what any frustrated homeowner would do when faced with a cranky lawnmower or plumbing quandary: they started searching YouTube for repair videos. 

Neff is a polar glaciologist and an assistant professor in the U of M’s Department of Soil, Water, and Climate. His research focuses on examining ice cores to establish past climate conditions, which can help predict how global warming will affect sea level rises and other aspects of the environment.

This trip was his seventh expedition to Antarctica, and the spot he and Andreasen landed was near Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica, an area of particular importance. “As a glaciology community, if there’s one glacier we’re most worried about on the planet, it’s Thwaites glacier, which is about the area of the state of Florida,” he says.

Thanks to a Starlink connection, the team eventually found some helpful repair videos and traced the problem to the generator’s throttle. They were able to mollycoddle one of the machines into working well enough to extract the final cores. “To say there are a lot of variables that you’re working against in Antarctica is an understatement,” says Neff.

West Antarctica is losing ice at a rapid rate, and Thwaites glacier is a prime example. Neff speculates that relatively warm water is getting beneath the floating extension of the glacier, known as an ice shelf, that is cantilevered out over the sea. If gaps form where the glacier rests on land, warmer water can sneak underneath the ice shelf and accelerate melting.

“The ice shelves are sort of the corks in the bottles that hold back the ice upstream,” Neff explains. “If the retreat continues, we won’t see the glaciers stabilize and regrow.” At that point, says Neff, sea levels will rise. “It’s a matter of centimeters for Thwaites glacier, but when you push out to the year 2300, you’re talking maybe 10 meters of sea level rise from West Antarctica if it really starts to run away.” That would swamp shorelines globally, flooding for instance about a third of Florida. “It’s one of the tipping points we’re worried about.”

Neff and his colleagues study climate data frozen in the cores they collect that reveal all kinds of information on the weather patterns of the Thwaites glacier region. The data are crucial for climate research; there are no research stations in that area, and computer modeling is not robust enough to show any reliable projections about what the weather conditions have been in the decades since researchers noticed concerning changes in the glaciers.

“Antarctica has highly variable climate conditions from year to year,” says Neff. “We’re the first team to push to get these types of records, which will help us reconstruct the last 100 to 200 years at annual resolution so that we can clarify some things."

This was Andreasen’s first trip to Antarctica. The U of M doctoral student is studying ice rises and the modeling of climate data, and had done field work on glaciers in Canada, but this was different. “As someone who has stared at imagery of Antarctica for years, it was surreal to finally be put into that context,” she says. “I was focused on the mission, but I think the excitement was overpowering. Once you’re there for the first time, with nothing around you and flat white as far as you can see, you’re very aware of how remote you are.”

Almost as soon as the team had their tents set up, the camp was hit with a massive ice storm. Andreasen was buried in her tent when a nook she had carved out of the snow collapsed. “I should have slept with a shovel,” she says. “And 24 hours in a tent gives you a lot of time for self-reflection.” Andreasen and Neff were able to talk using their Garmin InReach satellite communicators, but the visibility was too poor for anyone to try to maneuver in the storm. “I think actually the storm in hindsight sort of helped us,” says Neff. “It was like peak intensity. We knew it couldn’t get worse than that. The 10 days of stability that followed allowed us to focus on nothing but drilling.”

Once the storm cleared, Neff and his colleagues rushed to set up their coring drill—which included a 25-foot tower—and enclose the work area under a high tent. Neff and Gros drilled the cores, and Andreasen cut, labeled, and packed the half-meter cylinders of ice into foam containers as fast as possible. Neff then buried the containers in the snow until the helicopters returned to retrieve the team and fly them to the ship that would take them home.

“I put stakes out to mark where the containers were, but I was still terrified of losing them,” he says.

On the final science day, the team drilled to their target depth of 150 meters, packed the samples, and broke camp just in time for their appointment with the airlift back to the ship. It took months to ship the ice cores back to their final storage location in Colorado, and it will be more months before they reap the first data from the cores, but Neff is already looking for his next ride to Antarctica. “There’s another South Korean cruise scheduled. If our interests are aligned, I’m ready to go."

Chris Quirk is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

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