![]() They would have a month at Thwaites to conduct their respective research projects before the return trip began. Our expedition was led by the Korea Polar Research Institute, which had brought some forty researchers from around the world to the Araon. We would spend a week or so sailing from Christchurch to the edge of Antarctica, then break through the pack ice of the Amundsen Sea, before arriving at Thwaites Glacier-one of the fastest-retreating on the continent. ![]() In the heat, ice was a little hard to picture, let alone icebreaking. It was January 3rd, summer in New Zealand. Its hull was painted a cheerful persimmon color, and its bow was conspicuously higher than the rest of the ship, with a curved shape suggesting that icebreakers don’t so much carve through ice as climb and crush, climb and crush. The largest icebreakers are more than five hundred feet long, but the Araon was only the length of a football field I wondered how it would handle the waves of the Southern Ocean, and how it would fare against the thick sea ice that guards the last wilderness on Earth. I first saw our icebreaker, the RV Araon, when we were due to leave for Antarctica.
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