54.17 degrees South latitude
 70.90 degrees West longitude

Welcome to the town of Punta Arenas, Chile, at the southern tip of South America. At the pier sits the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot icebreaker and research vessel operated by the United States Antarctic Program. 

We’ll soon head south on this ship across the Drake Passage, and sail along the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of land that reaches up from the main part of Antarctica and tickles the dangling nubbin of South America. On board the Palmer are roughly two dozen scientists and several dozen crew—plus a trio of journalists on assignment with National Geographic: Maria Stenzel, photographer; Sarah Park, videographer; and myself, Douglas Fox, the writer.

Our voyage will last 59 days; we plan to return to port on March 2 or so. The purpose of the trip is to study how Antarctica is responding to rising temperatures—and no better place to do it than the Antarctic Peninsula, where average temperatures have risen 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years—nearly five times as quickly as in most other parts of the planet. The ice in this part of Antarctica has seen some dramatic, in some cases even catastrophic, changes. More on that in a minute.

Our research team hails from at least five countries (the U.S., Belgium, Spain, Korea, and Australia), and includes scientists from a dozen or so universities—led by Eugene Domack, a marine geologist from Hamilton College in New York, and Bruce Huber, an oceanographer from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. I’ll say plenty more about the scientists we’re traveling with in the coming days, but for the moment we’re still sitting in port, in Chilean Patagonia, preparing to go.

Patagonia is known for its dramatic clouds and drama-queen weather, and today they were on display. As workers winched heavy equipment onto the ship, winds gusts up to 60 knots kicked up whitecaps, sprayed salt water on the pier, and shut down the ship’s crane—one of several factors that will delay our departure by a day or two.

Once we set sail, it’s 12 hours of smooth sailing in comparatively sheltered water, and then we’ll spend two days crossing the Drake Passage, a corridor of notoriously nasty—and nauseating—seas separating South American from Antarctica. Nowhere else on Earth are winds free to push sea swells full circle around the globe, with no land to break their momentum. The Palmer will roll relentlessly side to side as she crosses the Drake, and in preparation the crew and scientists have spent days securing cargo. 

But the Drake Passage will amount to naught but a hazing. Farther south, once we reach Antarctica, lies the bigger challenge: sea ice, up to six feet thick, which can slow the ship’s progress to a crawl. Photos from NASA’s MODIS satellite, orbiting 440 miles above, show that it’s a heavy ice year on the Weddell Sea (along the eastern edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, where we’re headed). 

If we’re lucky, storms will break up that ice so the Palmer doesn’t have to do so much of the work on its own. The latest MODIS image, 1:45 pm today, provides some hope. Westerly winds have pried open a rift in the peninsula’s thick apron of ice, called fast ice, that’s glued to its coastline. It could provide our ship a north-south corridor a few hundred yards across through which to navigate. We’ll continue watching MODIS as gaps in the clouds provide glimpses here and there. 

Our goal sits on the other side of several hundred miles of sea ice: the Larsen Embayment (or just call it Larsen Bay). For at least 11,000 years a slab of glacial ice, called the Larsen B Ice Shelf, hung off the edge of the peninsula and floated on the ocean here. That ice was 600 feet thick and covered an area 15 times the size of Manhattan. By some accounts, the Larsen B Ice Shelf may have even survived here for as long as 120,000 years. Then in 2002, it disintegrated. Over 35 days it fractured like a windshield, and its hundreds of shards, each as heavy as a skyscraper, floated out to sea and melted. 

This research expedition, called LARISSA (Larsen Ice Shelf System-Antarctica), will perform a postmortem on the Larsen B. What were the mortal wounds that led to its sudden collapse? How are the nearby glaciers responding? (We already know that one glacier is moving and emptying its ice into the ocean—eight times faster than before.) Will larger masses of ice, farther south, suffer a similar fate? And what climate thresholds will trigger these events—and can we predict them? And finally, how are ocean ecosystems that have sat in the dark for thousands of years now responding to the flood of light? The scientists on board the Palmer hope to answer these and many other questions. Wish us sea-worthy stomachs, gaps in the sea ice, and a bit of luck. And please come round for further updates! —Douglas Fox

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