Climate journalism, adventure memoir, and personal reflection weave together in this nonfiction book about 3 groups of scientists from multiple continents journeying to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica aboard the R/V Palmer in 2019. The author joins them to document the journey, the research, and the community they build along the way. Known as the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites—in West Antarctica—is retreating rapidly, and its collapse is predicted to raise sea levels by more than two feet. These scientists are the first to study it up close because the Amundsen sea, once a frozen mass, has partially melted.

There is much to like in this book: the details of the ocean, the calving glacier, the tiny penguin bones dug up for study, the core mud samples dropped into storage bags, the daylight that never ends, the machinery and technology that propels and sustains 57 people in the Southern Ocean.

What stands out most is teamwork as a core tenet of the book: that we learn best through collaboration, not competition. That Antarctica is no longer a place to build a reputation as an explorer/adventurer but as part of a team of climate learners looking for causes and solutions to a warming planet. The author makes a point to include in this team not just the scientists, but also the mechanics, deck crew, and cooks—support staff rarely acknowledged in such voyages but without whom the science could not succeed.

Threaded through the discussion of climate change is the author’s dilemma of bringing a child into the world, a dilemma many young people grapple with today as they consider climate fear and their personal carbon footprint (which, by the way, was BP’s 2005 media campaign that hoisted responsibility for climate change onto individuals, deflecting it away from fossil fuel companies). 

But the book falters when she veers away from the actual journey and science and dives too far and too often into extended reflections on her own potential motherhood. She also includes birth stories from each crew member (which feels weird and out of place), and eventually her own story—in far too much detail—of giving birth a year later. All of this motherhood rumination feels overdone, overly dramatic, and oddly forced into an otherwise well-written documentation of glacial study and the demands of living at sea with strangers for two months.