In January of 2019, journalist Elizabeth Rush joined 56 scientists and crew people aboard an ice-breaking research vessel to study the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. The glacier, which is about the size of the state of Florida, has been nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier” for the effect its disintegration would likely play in the rise of global sea levels. 

“If we lose Thwaites, there's great concern that we will lose the entirety or big portions of the West Antarctic ice sheet and that those glaciers combined contain enough ice to raise global sea levels 10 feet or more,” Rush told Dan Richards on this episode of Trending Globally. 

Rush recounts her voyage aboard the Palmer and how it reshaped her understanding of our changing climate and planet in her 2023 book, “The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World.” However, as the title suggests, the book is also about another, more personal journey: Rush’s decision to have a child. 

The resulting book is part adventure travelogue, part mediation on the meaning of motherhood, and part climate change manifesto. It also offers some much-needed wisdom on how to envision a future when it feels like the world is falling apart.

Learn more about and purchase “The Quickening”

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DANIEL RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. In January of Twenty Nineteen, Elizabeth Rush boarded the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a research vessel docked on the Southern tip of Chile and set off for Antarctica.

Elizabeth is a journalist and assistant professor of the practice at Brown University. And she joined the seven-week scientific exploration through the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Elizabeth has reported around the world on how climate change is reshaping lives and communities, but this was unlike any trip she'd taken before. As one of the organizers of the program told her before she officially joined the trip--

ELIZABETH RUSH: She said, "You know, when you are there, it will be easier for us to send help to folks on the Space Station than it will be for us to get help to you on this icebreaker."

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And it really didn't hit me until I was probably like 10 days into this voyage. We'd crossed the Drake Passage, which is the most reliably wild ocean on the planet. We had a particularly rough crossing with regular waves, 25, 30-feet tall. And we had no internet. And I was like, I've never traveled 10 days to get anywhere in my life. It started to physically manifest just how far away we were. So isolated at the bottom of the planet.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Despite its isolation, where Elizabeth and her crewmates were bound for is one of the most important regions in the world for understanding how climate change might reshape our planet. Elizabeth recounts this voyage and its significance to our understanding of climate change in her book The Quickening-- Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World.

But as the title suggests, the book isn't just about glaciers melting and sea levels rising. It's also about Elizabeth's decision to have a child and how that decision related to her Antarctic voyage and her understanding of our planet's future.

ELIZABETH RUSH: They thought the book was going to be like, do I want to have a kid? Yes or no. And I had to recognize that I did want to have a kid. The book was really about how to allow that desire to survive, knowing what I know about the climate.

DANIEL RICHARDS: On this episode, Elizabeth Rush on her journey to Antarctica, what that continent's future means for the rest of us, and how to think about the future when it can feel like the world is falling apart.

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Elizabeth Rush, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Thanks for having me, Daniel.

DANIEL RICHARDS: So your last book, Rising-- Dispatches from the New American Shore, was largely about how humans and communities are navigating rising seas in a changing planet. And so I'm just curious, what drew you to writing next about Antarctica, a place where there are many fewer humans.

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ELIZABETH RUSH: Well, I definitely think the two are very much connected in my mind. I spent almost a decade in these frontline communities all around the United States that were banding together to adapt to and respond to rising sea levels. And at some point, I think I grew really interested in two things at the same time.

One was I wanted to see the source of those rising sea levels up close, and that meant traveling either to the North or the South Pole of the planet, where we have these massive glacial systems, and where a lot of the Earth's fresh water is locked up. And exponentially, more of that water is locked up in Antarctica. So I became really interested in going to Antarctica.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Which Elizabeth got to do aboard the Palmer Research vessel. And frankly, she could not have picked a more appropriate destination on the continent than the one they were due for.

ELIZABETH RUSH: We were headed to a very particular glacier. We were headed to Thwaites Glacier. It's part of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

DANIEL RICHARDS: It is a very important glacier when it comes to understanding and modeling future sea-level rise. So much so, it has a nickname. And not a fun one.

ELIZABETH RUSH: The Doomsday Glacier.

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DANIEL RICHARDS: Thwaites is very, very large. It is about the size of the state of Florida.

ELIZABETH RUSH: It alone contains enough ice to raise global sea levels 2 feet.

DANIEL RICHARDS: But scary as that is, that's not why it has that nickname. The nickname actually comes from the effect it might have on the rest of Antarctica, if Thwaites ended up melting.

ELIZABETH RUSH: That's because it acts as a kind of cork to the entire West Antarctic ice sheet.

DANIEL RICHARDS: In other words?

ELIZABETH RUSH: If we lose the weight, there's great concern that we will lose the entirety or big portions of the West Antarctic ice sheet. And those glaciers combined contain enough ice to raise global sea levels 10 feet or more. So Thwaites is probably the single most important glacier on the planet in terms of the possibility of rapid sea level rise rates this century.

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DANIEL RICHARDS: The vessel Elizabeth was on would be the first to journey to what's known as the calving edge of Thwaites, which is where massive chunks of the glacier break off into the sea. The front lines of this glacier's dissolution. On board with her were teams of scientists from around the world who would live together for seven weeks as they all pursued their own research into the glacier.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Some of the scientists on board were taking core samples from the seafloor right in front of the weights in an attempt to reconstruct past retreat rates of the glacier. We also had scientists on board who were sending submarines under the floating ice shelf in front of the weights. Trying to get real time temperature measurements, because we really don't have any observational data from this glacier, and particularly the place where this glacier discharges into the sea.

So they were trying to get what seemed like really basic pieces of information. How warm is the water? How fast is it moving? How salty? So that they can put that information into sea level rise models and calculate how quickly the glacier might retreat based on that information.

DANIEL RICHARDS: And with that information, hopefully, better model how much our sea levels might rise.

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Before we look more at the science and climate change, just going back to this trip will make you less accessible to the rest of the world than if you were in outer space. I was constantly surprised reading this book of all the different things that were so different about life on this trip compared to everyday life. From how food was prepared, to how you packed your clothes. What was most surprising to you about life on this boat?

ELIZABETH RUSH: Gosh. I mean, if I'm being truly honest, I was really nervous about getting on the boat. There were 57 of us on it. And I think I stepped off of the boat two or three times during almost three months of my life. And so I was really nervous about spending so much time with other human beings.

We were very isolated. And yet I'm an only child, I had to share a bedroom. All of that made me pretty anxious going into it. And the thing that surprised me was how respectful other people were of the need for privacy, and the way that I learned to be alone together with other human beings.

DANIEL RICHARDS: The physics of travel by sea also took some getting used to for Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH RUSH: In the crossing, we had to literally secure everything. So I woke up at some point in the middle of the night. The whole ship was pitching back and forth, and I looked down, and like, my boots are skittering across the floor. My chair is skittering across the floor. Anything that I hadn't secured with a bungee to my desk had become possessed by some kind of poltergeist in that room in the middle of the night. So there was a lot of stuff like that, too, where you're just like, oh. Things that normally shouldn't happen are happening.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Right. Boots can't just sit on the floor.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. You have to secure everything always.

DANIEL RICHARDS: So this book, it's a story of this voyage and it's a story of climate change. But it's also largely about your decision and thoughts around having a child. And I wonder, how and when did these ideas all become connected to you?

ELIZABETH RUSH: Well, I can still remember preparing for the journey. And one thing that I do as a non-fiction writer is I usually go to the library and I take out a bunch of books that have been written on similar topics, and I try to get a sense of how that topic has been broached in the past. And I went to the Rockefeller Library at Brown, and I got out a bunch of books on Antarctica.

And only when I got them back to my office did it occur to me that I had probably taken out two or three dozen books. And only two were written by women. And there were no authors of color in the stack of texts that I had taken out. And I very quickly realized that the stories that we tell about Antarctica tend to be ones of conquest. They tend to be driven by imperialism or extraction.

And I knew then that I wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with that tradition. And around this time, I started to really take the baby steps towards wanting to get pregnant. So I wanted to have a child. I remember saying that to my doctor, and saying like, oh. But I think I'm going to go to Antarctica. And you can't be pregnant if you go to Antarctica. That's one of the rules. I had to pass a physical examination and prove that I wasn't pregnant to go on this boat.

And she said, like, OK. But you'll be like a geriatric pregnancy when you get back. And somehow, the way that this scientific program is run was starting to shape some of my reproductive decisions and the timing around them. And I thought about how childbearing just never comes up when you read about Antarctica. And so it felt to me like there might be something worthwhile in holding that alongside the Antarctic continent.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Elizabeth's book grapples with long running questions that have existed within the environmental movement. Questions about how to think about having children in what feels like such an unstable, uncertain moment in our planet's history.

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Concern over Earth's limited resources amidst a constantly growing human population has existed for centuries. However, in the Nineteen Sixties, concern about the growing human population became more explicitly tied to the environmental movement. In Nineteen Sixty-Eight, biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which framed the growing human population as an issue that would soon lead to widespread famine and social upheaval around the world.

Environmentalists more and more started to view humanity as bad for the planet. Groups like the rather dramatically named voluntary Human Extinction Movement encouraged people to refrain from having kids on environmental grounds. But this type of thinking also took a different darker turn in that era.

ELIZABETH RUSH: That narrative is a very ugly one once you start to scratch beneath the surface. That narrative in the '70s looked like programs to curtail the reproductive rights of Black and Brown people, both in the US and abroad.

DANIEL RICHARDS: While Paul Ehrlich's predictions of mass famine never quite came to pass, and thankfully, the more racist and eugenicist ideas about reproduction have been exorcized from the environmental movement, questions about the environmental mental impact of having children still haunt many people who care about the future of the planet, especially young people.

According to a study in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, roughly a third of teenagers and young adults say they are hesitant to have children because of climate change. And in the last few decades, a new framing has developed for weighing the environmental implications of this and just about every other life decision.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Carbon calculus.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Meaning, like, your carbon footprint.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Your carbon footprint is another way to think about it. Should I buy a plug in hybrid? Should I bike to work? Should I eat organic meat? We have been taught to really analyze our personal consumer decisions around the size of the carbon footprint that they create. And increasingly, I think see, I don't even know if this is quite as true today as it was maybe five years ago. But five years ago, you would see not infrequently headlines like want to shrink your carbon footprint? Have one less kid.

DANIEL RICHARDS: As someone who cares deeply about humans impact on the planet and is concerned for the future of the planet, Elizabeth had often felt ambivalence and even at times guilt about her desire to have children. But this specific framing around the idea that children produce a carbon footprint never quite landed for her.

ELIZABETH RUSH: I always had a little bit of a feeling of skepticism towards that move. I was sort of like, there's a categorical error here. Getting blueberries from Peru in Rhode Island in December is not the same as having a baby. Buying a Prius is not the same as having a baby. One of these decisions feels spiritual and another feels like just another consumer choice.

DANIEL RICHARDS: And then, while researching her book, Elizabeth learned about the origins of our current obsession over carbon footprints. Turns out, it was not popularized by some rogue biologist or group of environmentalists. Who was responsible for this new trend in environmental thinking, you ask?

ELIZABETH RUSH: British Petroleum actually popularized the carbon footprint in Two Thousand Six.

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You can look at charts of word usage and phrase usage over time, and you can see that our usage of the word carbon footprint really starts to spike around Two Thousand Six, Two Thousand Seven, Two Thousand Eight. And that's in large part because British Petroleum pumped millions of dollars into an ad campaign to get people to start thinking with a carbon footprint in mind. The whole goal being to offload guilt and responsibility onto the individual consumer and away from the corporations who are responsible for extraction of fossil fuels.

So this is not unlike moves that we've seen with tobacco and other dangerous substances, where they're trying to offload responsibility onto the individual. When I found that out, the years of guilt that I had felt around having a of quickly morphed into a rage. I felt like, get out of my uterus, British Petroleum. You're not actually invited to the table for this conversation.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Were there any compelling arguments you heard from environmental activists or thinkers about not having a kid because of any various reasons that are like grounded in environmental issues?

ELIZABETH RUSH: Something that I hear not infrequently-- I mean, let's put it this way. Kids take a lot of time, and they take a lot of energy to raise. And I definitely have some activist friends who have actively chosen not to have children because they want to save that energy for their activism. And that makes a lot of sense to me.

And at no point do I want to give people the sense that I know what they should do with their own reproductive decisions. I'm more interested in just having an open conversation around how climate and reproduction are intersecting with one another and shaping one another. Because almost every single person I know who's having children or not is thinking about climate in the same sentence. And yet we don't really have a ton of great guidance around how to do that or examples from the past around how to do that.

DANIEL RICHARDS: What are ways that you think are productive ways to incorporate thinking about the climate and reproduction? Like, the carbon footprint framing, obviously, is not compelling. But for all these people who you say, yeah. Think about climate and reproduction in the same sentence, should they just not think about them in the same sentence, or is there a better way to think about them together?

ELIZABETH RUSH: No. I think that it's really useful to think about them in the same sentence. But for me, thinking about them in the same sentence meant like, I have to commit to trying to make this world livable and a place in which call it reproduction, call it flourishing, call it regeneration, but I want to be on the side of regeneration. Where regeneration is possible.

So what can I do to make that possible? There's a really great book called Conceivable Futures that I wish had existed when I was thinking about these decisions, in part because it's not exactly a how-to guide, but it has a lot around, OK. So you want this future to be a place where everyone can flourish. What does that look like in your own life?

And I think it helps readers move into action as a way and out of guilt or anxiety or nervousness. I think a lot of people are in the world of guilt and anxiety and nervousness right now. And for me, the biggest antidote to that is to start to act towards and move towards the future that I want to be possible.

DANIEL RICHARDS: In May of Twenty Twenty, a little over a year after her trip on the Palmer, Elizabeth gave birth to her son. She now has two kids. As Elizabeth said earlier in the episode, she very intentionally set out to tell a new type of story set in Antarctica. Her book explores ideas that haven't had a big place in Antarctic literature before, exploring questions around reproduction, gender, and family.

About halfway through the trip, these themes all collided into each other in a way she never could have anticipated. It started with a surprise change to the Palmer's itinerary a few weeks into the trip.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Literally, the day that we arrived at Thwaites after being at sea for almost a month, our ship immediately turned around. We were told that one person on the boat was sick enough that they had to get immediate medical attention. And that we didn't have what was needed to deal with their condition on board. None of us really knew what was happening.

DANIEL RICHARDS: They came to learn that one of the people leading the expedition, a woman named Lindsey, was sick, but they didn't know anything else.

ELIZABETH RUSH: There was this great impulse to not share information, in part because they really didn't want Lindsey's family to hear about it somehow, second hand, if the information traveled off the boat.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Lindsey was experiencing extreme abdominal pain, which Elizabeth later learned was the result of a uterine cyst. However, the medical team on board wasn't able to confirm this at the time. And they were concerned it could be something much more serious. That's because it turned out Lindsey was pregnant.

They were concerned it could be an ectopic pregnancy, a very treatable but potentially life-threatening condition. However, they couldn't determine any of this for certain because the boat lacked an ultrasound. Well, kind of.

ELIZABETH RUSH: We had a machine on board called a Knudsen echosounder, which is the equivalent of being able to essentially send sound waves into the ocean and get a bounce back to map the ocean floor. Works the same way an ultrasound works. So we had one of these machines to analyze how deep the ocean was everywhere we went. But we didn't have an ultrasound on board, which is like a couple thousand dollars gizmo to be able to see what was happening inside Lindsey's body.

DANIEL RICHARDS: Given this uncertainty, they turn their ship around and made their way to Rothera Research Station, a British facility on Antarctica that has an airstrip.

ELIZABETH RUSH: She was put-- oh, gosh. I forget the name of the machine. But she was put in this little basket and taken off the boat that way and then put in another boat. And then we saw her plane take off. And then we got a message like a day later that she was OK. And we were like, OK. So all we knew during the mission was that she was fine.

DANIEL RICHARDS: The cost of this trip, though, was significant. We lost 10 science days and we lost them, I think, because we were unprepared to offer medical help to the woman who was on board. And that's partly also because there's this long history in Antarctica of women not being invited to the ice.

So you can see the first all-female expedition to get to the South Pole happens in the late 60s. Women really aren't traveling on icebreakers until the 80s. So there's a long history of women being excluded from the ice. And I think that is the primary driver for what made us lose those science days.

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Lindsey made it safely back to land, and a few months later, gave birth to her child. And as for the bigger scientific mission that Elizabeth was following on board, despite the detours and delays the Palmer faced, the scientists on board were able to gather important new data about Thwaites, which is changing how we think about the glacier and our planet.

For example, they discovered that warm water is eating away at Thwaites faster than anyone previously thought. They also found cracks on the glacier, indicating that the only ice shelf still buttressing Thwaites could break apart in as soon as five years. An analysis of penguin bones on the glacier revealed that it hasn't regenerated any time in the last 10,000 years. And therefore, once it falls apart, Thwaites is unlikely to regenerate anytime soon.

This data, so much data about our changing climate, doesn't necessarily reflect something that humans can see with their naked eyes or perceive on a time scale that we can feel. That's one of the things that makes explaining climate change. So difficult. However, that wasn't the case for all the data that was gathered on the Palmer.

ELIZABETH RUSH: I think one of the most remarkable things that happened while I was there, I can remember going out on the bridge wings one morning. We're working right in front of Thwaites. And it's this absolutely gorgeous morning. And I start taking photos of these icebergs and they're lavender and faceted.

And there's a lot of them all around us. But it's really one of the most like calm, remarkable moments of the cruise so far. I spent a lot of time outside that morning. And I come inside to find the chief scientist toggling back and forth between two satellite images that have worked their way on board. And one shows the weights as this solid sheet of ice, and the next, it looks like an angry God has taken a hammer to a windshield and just smashed it into 100 pieces.

Rob, the chief scientist, says to me, the solid-looking Thwaites is the day that we arrived. And this is a week later. And it looks like there's been a significant collapse of the ice shelf while we've been here. And I realized that we're sailing through the heart of the thing that we were there to study. That a big chunk of the weight has fallen apart since our arrival.

DANIEL RICHARDS: You spent a lot of time in the book reflecting on just how to move forward in moments of uncertainty and among things that are out of your control. And even after the trip was over and after you gave birth to your son, a lot of the book you ended up writing during the pandemic, which was its own voyage of sorts.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Yeah. Totally.

DANIEL RICHARDS: As we wrap up, I think for a lot of people, the last few weeks in American politics have added another layer of uncertainty how to think about climate change and our collective future. And I just wonder, as someone who's thought so much about this aspect of life, like, what would you say to people who are maybe more concerned than ever about how we move forward.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Oh, gosh. Yeah. The learning to live with uncertainty, I think of that as like a muscle that we have to work out. And not to throw my parents under the bus or anything, but sometimes I think our slightly older generation has not had a ton of exercise with that muscle in a long time, especially those who have arrived at relative financial stability.

So yeah. We're all getting trained in it, again, through the pandemic, through the second Trump presidency. How do you survive uncertainty? I can't tell you how many people in my close circle of colleagues and friends who are very environmentally concerned, the past couple of weeks, I've heard from a lot of people. We have to love the people who are close by. We have to fight our fights at the local level. We have to invest in state and city politics.

And it's fascinating to me. I think that all of that is true. And in some ways, it sounds like a deep tribalism that I'm hearing emerge amongst folks who are looking for a way to survive the next round of upheavals. And I don't think that that instinct is necessarily wrong. And it also makes me ask, how do you make sure that that opportunity for care-- at small scale, how do you make sure that that opportunity for care isn't just one that you experience, or isn't just one that your neighbor experiences?

Because I still want to think of a universe in which that sense of flourishing is possible, regardless of where you are and who you are. So I don't know. I think looking local, battering down, staying close, do potlucks, take care of your babies, all of that is really important. And also, let's not lose sight of the fact that that's something that we hope can be extended equally to all.

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DANIEL RICHARDS: Elizabeth Rush, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

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DANIEL RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards and Zach Hirsch. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you like the show, leave us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And while you're there, be sure to subscribe to the show, too. It really helps other listeners to find us. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks for listening.

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