The sun skims low on the horizon as I snatch wakefully for the midnight alarm. Sleep is hard when it’s never dark. Unthreading safety straps, I roll out off the top bunk to the roiling floor, scratchy commercial carpet pitching on the wilds of the Southern Ocean. The stabilizer screeches like a demonic playground swing as it throws the ship back the opposite direction from the lurch of a wave. Foam laces the porthole, glinting over ink-slush seas.
That’s a memory from 2007, when I sailed on Australia’s now-retired icebreaker, the Aurora Australis, as part of a scientific research voyage monitoring oceans and biology around Antarctica. My role involved collecting water samples to monitor changes (potentially due to climate change) in water properties around the continent.
During the last deglaciation fifteen thousand years ago, global sea level rose nearly sixty feet in less than five hundred years. Known as meltwater pulse 1A, this event was discovered in 1989 via shallow-dwelling corals found in the deep sea, bolstering emerging theories that climate change could be rapid. Ice and sediment cores in Greenland had already revealed evidence of recurrent spikes in atmospheric temperature of 10 to 15 degrees Celsius during the last sixty thousand years, and these spikes were closely spaced in time with other sea-level rise events. Ice sheet formation and decay clearly played a role in these climate changes, and the game was on to determine how, and how much.
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