Welcome t the Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien podcast, where we g behind the scenes of the Arizona PBS documentary series Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien.

We'll discuss the challenges the discoveries, and the things you might not get from watching the television series alone.

I'm your host, Elise Hu and joining me on this podcast is the veteran science journalist himself, Miles O'Brien.

On this episode, we're talking about what's referred to as the Doomsday Glacier.

Miles O'Brien, welcome in.

Hi, Elise, how are you?

I'm doing great.

And I'm curious about your adventure down in Antarctica.

Have you been to Antarctica before this particular trip?

No, I got my ticket punched in a big way.

So I, you know, as yo know, Elise, I was at CNN for 17 years, and I planned no les than three trips to Antarctica, which got canceled for budgetary and scheduling reasons each time.

And it wa it was a point of frustration.

I actually wanted to do two things when I was at CNN, g to Antarctica and go to space.

I got close to going to space.

That didn't work out, unfortunately and Antarctica never happened.

So when I finally got this opportunity, David Holland of New York University, who we focused on in this Resolved to Solv episode, called me up and said, do you want to come this season?

And I said, do I?

Of course, I've been wanting to do this forever.

And, you know, it' not I'm not getting any younger.

And and he said, well we're going to go to Thwaites.

And I was like, oh, that's even better.

I can't imagine a more important or consequential story than Thwaites.

And he said, and then he said, but you have to commit to two months.

And I was like, oh boy, careful what you wish for, right?

So I at first I was concerne that I was not going to be able to get away from, you know my other duties for PBS NewsHour and so forth for two months.

And then I realized that with satellite technologies such as it is, the Starlinks, we could be reporting live HD, 4K, full motion video all the way down to Thwaites and back on this icebreaker that we were going to go on.

And so when I realized that, I thought, wow, let's turn this two month idea into an opportunity to report on something like it's never been reported on before just because of the technical changes.

And so I was able to, you know, convince everybody that I was going to be abl to feed the beast, so to speak, and report as we were doing.

And then people got excited about that, as did I. And so it was it turned out to be a very busy two months.

Believe it or not, I was the only time I was kin of watching the clock was after we set sail at the end back to New Zealand, and we had kind of done our work.

Let's take a look at a cli of your first look at Thwaites.

I can't even believe what I'm looking at.

It's just beautiful.

That's the face of the Thwaites Glacier.

We have made our way to an absolute ideal location in order for helicopters to reach the grounding line.

That's where the glacier meets the land, meets the ocean.

That's where scientists want to be.

Miles, you mentioned David Holland from the US, bu you also got to meet researchers and work with researchers from the UK and South Korea.

Can you break dow what their different roles were?

It was quite a scientific arc.

The lead item was to drill a small but long hole right at the place where the glacier meets the sea and the land.

It's called the grounding line.

And that's where this giant glacier which has wrapped up in it Thwaites two and a hal to three feet of sea level rise just in it, and it holds back another seven feet or so.

So combined it's about ten feet of sea level rise in this glacier.

It's melting at that point.

So that was the prime focus was to understand what is going on there.

What are the dynamics what is the how turbulent is it, how warm is the water currents, etc.. But when you're planning a mission like this, you want to try to bring other people along.

And so there was a lot of focus on the sea ice, for example, because sea ice and the melt o the glacier itself are linked.

Sea ice is not the same as glacier ice.

It's floating already in the ocean.

It's not a sea level rise component, but it has an impact on the melt.

There was a helicopter that flew over the glacier with an ice penetrating radar several missions to really try to characterize what's going on beneath the surface there to understand the undersea and under the terrain at the bottom of the glacier.

And then there was another device that they were poking into fissures in the glacier to take instantaneous readings of the water and current and salinity and so forth.

So it was a host of things that, you know, when you have a mission like that, a lot of it is just the opportunity to take a little bit of time and plop an instrument in the ocean and see what comes up.

And there was a lot of that on it all with the focu on getting that hot water drill hole drilled and everything else following behind it.

Was it sort of like Ocean's 11, where there's specialty?

You know, Sout Korea has a particular specialty and the UK has a particular specialty.

How do they all negotiate who's doing what?

Yeah.

Because, you know, you want everybody to be working in concert.

And the Brits pioneered the hot water drill concept, the idea of a fire hose of nearly boiling water going straight down through the ice to get you through the ice quickly.

This is not ice coring.

They're not interested in the ice.

They want to get to the ocean below and that's their thing.

And so they were there.

The Koreans are anxious to learn.

And so they were c investigators on that project.

But they're they're still in the phase of learning techniques and the technology.

The Koreans themselves provided the platform and were the conductors of the symphony, if you will.

South Korea, we have to give this nation great credit, has taken a leadership role in polar science.

It's a peninsula nation.

They care deeply about sea level rise and they are investing heavily in this research.

They're building a much bigger icebreaker for research, which will replace the one I was on.

And they're going to continue doing this every two years.

They want to go back to Thwaites to get more data.

So we have to give them a lot of credit.

The US, unfortunately, has stepped back significantly on Antarctic research in the wake of Trump budget cuts.

And so it's on the order of 80% cut.

And so the research icebreaker that the US used to operate is no longer in operation.

And the Koreans have taken this lead and are kind enough to bring US colleagues on board and give them space aboard these ships so they can do their work.

And so that's what led me to David Holland, who was very interested in long term - he wants to create a way of forecasting what's going to happen on Thwaites.

But he's also interested in a very provocative idea, which I'm sure you want to get into.

Yes, we sure will.

But let's take a loo at a clip first, which explains why the melting glacier really matters to the entire planet.

For thousands of years, the continental shelf protected Thwaites from exposure to the warm water like a natural dam.

But researchers believe climate change has altere wind patterns around Antarctica.

As a result, more cold, fresh water near the surface is flowing out to sea.

This creates a pathway for deep, warm water to spill over the continental shelf and flo to the Thwaites grounding line.

The continental shelf all around is reverse slope, meaning as you go inland it gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

So warm, salty water coming up onto it for some reason will fall downhill towards Antarctica.

The warm water eats away at the glacier from below and it is vanishing at an astonishing rate.

It is losing about 300ft of thickness every year.

Typical melt in Antarctica i less than one foot at the base.

So way, way beyond way out the norm here.

Are there other glaciers that come close to this?

Nothing.

Nothing comes close to that.

Thwaites is the size of Florida.

It holds enough water to increase global sea level by two and a half to three feet, and it serves as a keystone for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

If it and all the ice it holds back slid into the sea, it would add up to about ten feet of sea level rise worldwide.

Let's dig in on the consequences of a ten foot rise in sea levels worldwide.

That's if Thwaites and all the ice it holds does fall back into the sea.

Who would feel the impact first?

Well, you are in Los Angeles right now.

I don't know how many feet above ten feet you are at sea level where you're standing or sitting at the moment.

You know, it's probably a little bit of distance, but the fact is, you can imagine ten feet of sea level rise if you go, you know, to Sant Monica or Venice, for example.

What would that mean?

Coastal cities all around the world would be impacted significantly.

You can imagine the southern part of Florida becoming an Atlantis with that kind of sea level rise.

This is nothing to trifle with.

And it's it's frankly, as we discuss in the piece, it's very difficult to stop this from happening.

But and that's, you know, so you might say, well what's the solution, Miles?

And maybe there is one.

It may be inevitable, but could it be delayed?

Glaciers are like rivers of ice, and there's an undersea river valley 60 miles wide that funnel the warm water toward Thwaites.

This is such a small region of the earth, then it just might be possible to block it and pinch it.

David is intereste in researching a crazy sounding idea.

Could it be possibl to build an underwater barrier to deflect the warm water, a so-called sea curtain?

This modificatio could potentially stop that warm water and block it up.

And if this height is adequate, the water will be at bay.

Okay, this seems very cool, but why is there a discourse around this?

Why are some other scientists skeptical?

I got to tell you, Elise, it's really interesting.

I've been covering science and scientists for 30 plus years.

I have never seen such a vehement reaction.

Their heads explode when yo start talking about this stuff, because it raises this idea of a moral hazard that if we focus on on these, this is in the broader category of geoengineering.

And there are other geoengineering ideas to, you know, reduce the solar radiation by putting aerosols in the atmosphere.

There are mirrors in space.

There's all kinds of ideas out there which at first seem a little bit crazy.

But as you look at the problems we face, it probably is worth considering them at least.

But there are many scientists who would tell you any time and money spent exploring something like a sea curtain to try to fend off that warm water which is melting.

Thwaites is a really bad idea because it takes away time, money and effor spent on mitigating the problem and addressing climate change, which is an argument that I think made more sense a decade or so ago when there was stil a little more time to mitigate.

But we're not mitigating.

We are increasing our emissions.

We are going to blow through the Paris goals that were established by the world.

So it's very difficul to see how mitigation is going to get us there right now.

So what David Holland and other, you know, a growing but small number of scientists would tell you is we need to think about both.

Can we do both here?

We shouldn't put the mitigation aside, but we would be remis not to get the basic data to see if some of these grand ideas for geoengineering are, in fact, possible.

And I think that's a reasonable argument.

But scientists really get upset about it.

I guess it's a questio of limited funding for science.

And to the extent that the funding might go in this direction, because it does seem like a silver bullet solution that a politician might like, a scientist might get worried that other science that would be important might be neglected.

But I think it's an argument that is worth discussing further.

And I think it's changing over time.

And are there nations that would want to foot the bill?

I mean, because we're talking about billions if not trillion of dollars, and this would cost more than $1 billion for sure.

Yes, it's.

And who pays, right?

Antarctica is not owned by any one particular nation.

This is, you know, a 12 figure deal, right?

I mean, how many billions would it take to do this?

Is it even practical These are the questions, right.

And and that was why David Holland wanted to put these robots in the ocean there to, to, you know, measure the currents and the salinities and the temperatures at the mouth to Thwaites where this hot water comes in to see if it's a practical idea at all.

But then, yes, the other questions become incredibly problematic and become geopolitical and economic questions.

And the idea that the world would come together to do this is a very open question, to say the least.

But we can't even have a beginning discussion if we haven't gotten the basic data.

And that would be David Holland's point.

All right.

So I love to take a look behind the scenes.

So Miles, were there any particular challenges, any unique hurdles that you faced in trying to tell this story?

Living aboard an icebreaker for two months had its unusual challenges.

And you can you know, there's a quick scene in the piece where we talk about the the spicy seafood, which occasionally was caught me off guard.

I had a shared a bunk with David and we shared a bathroom.

And, you know, the food was good.

There was a workout facility.

The seas were not crazy wild like you see on YouTube.

Yeah, I was worried about the choppiness of the water.

Yeah, the Southern Ocean, you know, I was I was loaded for bear on seasickness, but that, that didn't present a particular problem.

I think, you know, navigating the steps on the ship with one arm, trying to hold a coffee cup, that was a definite problem.

I had to leave the coffee cup behind a little bit.

Here's the one thing I didn't anticipate.

All those I sort of foresaw as being issues.

But as I told you, we had the ability to report in real time.

And so not to spoil the whole story, but there was a distinct failure of the drilling effort.

And I reported about tha and did a live shot for PBS News and put it out ther on all the social media, etc.. And I was called to tas by the scientists by, you know, reporting it as a failure, using the word failure.

And they were really upset.

And here I was on this 300ft shi with nowhere to hide and said, you know, I do.

I don't mind peopl having problems with my stories, but usually a phone call or an email is good when you're sitting across the the table having dinner and they're excoriating you for saying that you described their efforts as a failure.

You really realize the impact of your journalism in a very profound way.

Yeah.

It's so direct to the feedback for our last question.

Miles are there any practical action items that viewers and listeners can take if they want to support this work?

Again, this is another one where you can go out.

There is a organizatio that is promoting this concept of a sea curtain.

You can you can find it out there and support it because it needs some seed money to do this basic research.

Some of this was funded by philanthropic efforts, David Holland's Buoys and so forth.

If they're going to really consider this as a possibility or even see if it's a possibility, they're going to have to build some kind of at scale prototype ideas out there.

What would it look like?

What would it be made of?

And that requires some seed money.

And then, you know beyond that, it's hard to know.

I always say, you know, vote with this in mind.

There's nobody that votes for, you know, the penguins in Antarctica.

They are free agents.

So it's a question of perhaps raising the discussion and getting people to talk about it in a way that is perhaps more serious.

I think people sort of discounte these ideas a decade or so ago.

And now, as the climate continues to warm and the problems continue to grow, there is an opportunity ther to have more of a conversation.

And I would encourage people to have this conversation.

Any final thoughts to share on finally getting to go to Antarctica?

I got to tell you, Elise, you shared that little clip where I just kind of was taken aback.

I was just kind of rolling my little camera, and I just my first in-person view of that glacier face was so emotional to me because it was so profoundly beautiful, so otherworldly.

And I'm sitting there looking at this thing, knowing, knowing full well that human beings, collectively, we seem determined to destroy it.

And so it was it was extremely emotiona in a way I didn't expect.

And, you know, I wish more people could have that experience.

Of course we could.

We could love it to death if we did that.

But I do think we need to appreciate the beauty that we have in this planet.

And while a glacie at the opposite end of the Earth may seem remote and distant, it has tremendous bearing on our lives.

As a practical matter and as a moral imperative we we should be preserving it.

It reminds me of the overview effect, like the astronaut on the Artemis mission recently, what they saw there, just like, wow.

Yeah, it's such a beautiful blue marble.

Why are we screwing it up?

Miles, thank you again.

Thanks so much.

And that does it for this episode.

Thanks, Elise.

Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien as a co-production of Mobias Media and Arizona PBS.

You can watch the show at azpbs.org/resolvetosolve This podcast is a productio of Central Sound at Arizona PBS.

Our video editors are Matthew Anderson and Macie Logan.

We get audio support from Joe Miller and Daniel Bevc Our producer is Anna Williams.

Executive producers Alex Kosiorek, Carol Yancho Scot Woelfel, and Miles O'Brien.

I'm your host Elise Hu.

Thanks for joining us.