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The clock is ticking. But low clouds have prevented helicopters from moving scientists and gear onto the continent’s fastest-melting glacier.
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Reporting from the icebreaker Araon in the Amundsen Sea
Jan. 13, 2026Updated 11:55 a.m. ET
After sailing to one of the world’s most remote glaciers, members of our Antarctic expedition have finally set foot on its hostile, deeply fractured surface.
Then they almost got stuck there overnight.
One of the trickiest operations on this voyage has begun, sort of. A 10-person team aboard the icebreaker Araon is hoping to drill deep into the immense Thwaites Glacier to better understand why it is melting at such an alarming rate.
The helicopter flight from the ship’s deck to the drilling site takes less than 20 minutes. But the Antarctic weather, which can change by the hour, just hasn’t cooperated.
When Dominic O’Rourke, one of the expedition’s two helicopter pilots, took to the skies with the first members of the drilling party Saturday morning, poor visibility quickly made him return to the ship.
Later that morning, Mr. O’Rourke took Chang W. Lee, my photographer colleague, and me up in his helicopter to see whether the weather was improving. Within seconds, we were soaring above the remnants of Thwaites’s western tongue, a 30-mile-long jumble of flat-topped icebergs that are moving out to sea at more than 20 feet a day. These blocks of ice are thousands of feet across and separated by canyons that glow an otherworldly blue, like a rugged landscape of mesas recast in ice and snow.
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