Studying Antarctica’s Ice From the Side of a Helicopter

Scientists aboard the icebreaker Araon could not drop instruments through a half-mile-deep hole in the Thwaites Glacier to inspect the warming waters beneath. Instead, researchers lowered equipment from helicopters into the narrow rifts between giant blocks of floating ice.

Warm ocean water pours into a deep undersea trough under Thwaites, melting the shelf from below and causing the glacier to slide faster from land into the ocean, contributing to global sea-level rise. To reach tight spots, Jamin Greenbaum of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and his team built a floating machine called RIFT-OX, about the size of a toolshed, designed to be lowered from the air and operated remotely.

RIFT-OX was collecting data in a large rift while Greenbaum and Siobhan Johnson of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey prepared to be flown in. The rifts are like canyons piled with broken ice; “Even though I’ve been in those rifts a lot, every time I go in it sort of feels like the first time,” Greenbaum said.

Antarctica, Thwaites Glacier