Scientists are sailing to “the world’s most difficult to reach place” to better understand how much and how fast the waters will rise as the ice in Antarctica melts due to global warming.

32 scientists will embark on a two-month expedition aboard an American research ship on Thursday to study the critical location where the vast but melting Thwaites glacier meets the Amundsen Sea and may soon lose significant volumes of ice due to warm water. Since it holds so much ice and might raise the oceans by more than two feet (65 centimeters) over many centuries if it completely melts, the glacier the size of Florida is known as the “doomsday glacier.

Thwaites, the world’s biggest land- and sea-based glacier, is currently the subject of a collaborative US/UK research project worth $50 million. Thwaites sits on Antarctica’s western half, east of the jutting Antarctic Peninsula, which used to be the place scientists were most concerned about, although it is not near any of the continent’s research stations.

An oceanographer from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg says the remoteness of the Thwaites region is the main reason for the large uncertainty in the projection of future sea level rise. “It is a very remote area, difficult to reach,” she said in an interview from the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, which was scheduled to leave its port in Chile hours later. “It is set up in a way that makes it vulnerable.” “And that is why we are concerned.”

Approximately 50 billion tons of ice are dumped annually into the ocean by Thwaites. Ted Scambos, an ice scientist at the McMurdo Land Station in Antarctica, said the glacier is responsible for about 4 percent of world sea rise, and the conditions that contribute to it losing more ice are accelerating.

Erin Pettit, an ice scientist at Oregon State University, believes Thwaites is collapsing in three ways:

• Ocean water melts the ice beneath the surface.
• There is a risk that a significant section of the glacier will break away from the seafloor and melt away in the ocean.
• There are hundreds of fractures in the glacier’s ice shelf, like a shattered windshield. With six-mile (10-kilometer) long fissures emerging in just a year, Pettit worries this will be the most problematic.

The Thwaites ice-water interface has never been crossed by anyone before. As of 2019, Wahlin was part of a team that researched the area via ship but did not set foot on land.

Two robot ships will be deployed by Wahlin’s crew, a large one called Ran and a smaller one called Boaty McBoatface, a crowdsourced-named drone that can penetrate further under the section of Thwaites that protrudes over the ocean.

Scientists on board the ship will take readings of the water’s temperature, the sea floor, and the ice cover. They will study ice fissures, the structure of the ice, and seals on islands near the glacier that have been tagged.

Wahlin described Thwaites as “different” from another ice shelf. This iceberg jumble looks like it is been compressed together. In other words, it is becoming more and more obvious that this is not a solid block of ice, like the others on the shelf. In contrast, “this was far more jagged and scarred.”