Cast of Characters 1

Prologue 5

ACT ONE

Part One | Departures 13

Part Two | Stalled 43

Part Three | First Passage 61

ACT TWO

Part One | Into the Ice 97

Part Two | Islands 119

Part Three | Between the Past and the Future 163

ACT THREE

Part One | Arrival 197

Part Two | Nameless Bay 213

Part Three | Underneath 247

ACT FOUR

Part One | The Quickening 277

Part Two | Holding Season 299

Part Three | Going to Pieces 323

Epilogue 345

Notes 359 Acknowledgments 392

An NPR Best Book of the Year

Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction

“The Quickening is a book of hope.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

An astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: the ominous Thwaites Glacier at Antarctica’s western edge. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans. And with them is author Elizabeth Rush, who seeks, among other things, the elusive voice of the ice.

Rush shares her story of a groundbreaking voyage punctuated by both the sublime—the tangible consequences of our melting icecaps; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—and the everyday moments of living and working in community. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for the human and more-than-human worlds. Along the way, Rush takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to create and celebrate life in a time of radical planetary change?

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting and heroism but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. Urgent, brave, and vulnerable, The Quickening is an absorbing account of hope from one of our most celebrated and treasured contemporary authors.

Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Rush’s work has appeared in a wide range of publications from the New York Times to Orion and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Howard Foundation among others. She splits her time between Bogota, Colombia and Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.