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Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Elizabeth Rush: Journey to the Doomsday Glacier

Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Bobi NYC

Science, Society & Culture, Comedy

4.83.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

She managed to write a lyrical, moving book about her journey to a massive glacier in Antarctica that, if it collapses into the ocean, would cause a catastrophic rise in sea level. Unexpectedly, it’s also a book about her difficulty in choosing motherhood in a time of radical climate change.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

0:06.8

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

0:14.9

I'm Alan Ulta, and this is Clear Invidit, Conversations About Connecting and Communicating.

0:27.3

I remember, you know, the morning that we knew we would arrive.

0:32.4

I woke up super early.

0:33.6

I was like a kid on Christmas, and I ran up to the bridge.

0:38.4

A good handful of my shipmates were up there already, and many people described the glacier

0:44.0

on that first morning as looking sick or gnarly, that it was full of sort of like strange

0:49.4

crevassing and slumping.

0:51.9

So I remember feeling like my heart was being pulled in sort of two directions at the

0:55.7

same time, like incredible awe and incredible grief, to realize that like this thing that

1:01.7

literally has taken me a month to get to, so the farthest I've ever traveled in my entire

1:06.6

life is being forced into strange shapes by human activity so far away from it.

1:15.1

That's Elizabeth Rush.

1:17.2

The glacier she saw that morning is Antarctic's thweights glacier.

1:22.2

It's often called the Doomsday Glacier because its melting would cause sea-level rise that

1:27.4

would be catastrophic.

1:29.8

She's written a wonderful lyrical book about that journey called The Quickening, Creation

1:35.3

and Community at the ends of the Earth.

1:38.6

We began our conversation with how she developed her people-focused approach to writing about

1:43.7

the changing climate in an earlier book, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist called Rising,

1:51.6

the Spatches from the New American Shore.

...

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