This is a very exciting time for our project. Professor David Holland, NYU, is onboard the South Korean research vessel Araon bound for Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica. Holland and team are preparing our moorings for deployment. The world will soon access novel data on the status of the warm water approaching the glacier.

Understanding the future of Thwaites is critical to projecting future global sea level. To forecast future sea levels, we need crucial data from the waters near the glacier. The Seabed Curtain Project is measuring ocean temperatures at two critical locations on this cruise. The first is moorings on a sill in the trough leading to the glacier, about halfway along the continental shelf between the shelf break and the grounding line. This is to be done with two robots (known as McLane Moored Profilers) that can measure profiles of ocean temperature, salinity, and currents.

The second is a mooring at the grounding line, where we are drilling through the ice shelf to install a fiber-optic cable that can measure a temperature profile through the ice shelf and
into the ocean cavity below (a technology known as DTS). This means that we have an integrated ocean-
temperature measurement program from the sill to the grounding zone tracing the pathway of the warm water.

Both observations are needed to forecast the threat posed by Thwaites to global sea level. 

We seek to use this new data and past data collected by others to conduct virtual modeling to determine whether, by blocking the sill with a virtual curtain, we can affect water temperatures at the grounding zone. We are not doing any physical environmental modification on this cruise.

On the cruise are also Miles O’Brien from PBS and Raymond Zhong from The New York Times.

We will share updates from the expedition on our website.