More In This Article On the morning of January 7, 2010, a bright
orange ship, squat and round-bellied, passed the northern tip of
the Antarctic Peninsula. The Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 94-meter
research icebreaker serving the U.S. National Science
Foundation, had chugged southward for three days since leaving
port in Punta Arenas, Chile, at the southern tip of South
America. It had weathered a roller coaster of 8- to 12-meter sea
swells, and winds over 100 kilometers per hour, as it crossed
the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica. The
ship, with two dozen scientists on board, had come to
investigate the effects of climate change on the thawing
peninsula. The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by more than 2
degrees Celsius in recent decades—four times faster than other
parts of the planet. This heating has triggered a dramatic
series of glacial ice collapses: since 1980, over 5,000 square
kilometers of floating glacial ice, 200 to 300 meters thick, has
crumbled into the ocean. Those floating ice shelv