On our first morning at the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, the air was still. The captain of our research icebreaker made a brave choice: Our ship would hold close to the ice shelf so that the sonar system would peer beneath it while producing a detailed map of the seafloor. The scientists on board, along with the writers like me, were the first people in the history to visit this part of Thwaites. Our task was to bring back as much information as possible about the place where ocean and ice meet.
If Antarctica collapsed, it could threaten West Antarctic Ice Sheet, causing global sea levels to jump 10 feet or more. In terms of the fate of our coastal communities, this particular glacier is the biggest wild card, the largest known unknown. Will Miami even exist in 100 years? Thwaites will decide.
Reading about the collapse of Antarctica’s glaciers, I feel I am being encouraged to jump to a conclusion: that no matter what we do now, what lies ahead is bound to be worse than what came before. This kind of thinking turns Antarctica into a passive symbol of the coming disaster. But what if we were to see Antarctica as a harbinger of change rather than doom (厄运)? This is why I came to Thwaites in 2019. I wanted to find out: Antarctica has the power to rewrite all our maps.
This week a paper analyzed the data from that exploration. The authors suggested that sometime Thwaites retreated at two to three times the rate we see today. Put another way: At the coldest period of the planet, Thwaites is stepping farther outside the script we imagined for it, likely challenging even our most detailed predictions of what is to come.
It took us nearly a month to arrive at the edge of Thwaites. It is one of the most remote regions on Earth. But despite the distance, what happens there is shaping us just as much as we are shaping it. If we can begin to recognize the agency of this faraway glacier, we will be one step closer to embracing the modesty that climate change demands.
【小题1】Why did the captain decide to approach the glacier?| A．To find out where ocean and ice meet. |
| B．To get scientists to do experiments on it. |
| C．To get information about the seafloor in details. |
| D．To help the author write down the historical moment. |
| A．The biggest decisive factor. |
| B．The most difficult thing to predict. |
| C．The wildest thing to take control of. |
| D．The remotest place to reach. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Approving. | C．Tolerant. | D．Critical. |
| A．To escape the coastal cities in time. |
| B．To respect the power of Antarctica. |
| C．To prevent the collapse of Antarctica’s glaciers. |
| D．To be modest in predicting climate change. |
