Elizabeth Rush

An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: Thwaites Glacier. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise. In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change? What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting 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. The Quickening teems with their voices—with the colorful stories and personalities of Rush’s shipmates—in a thrilling chorus. Urgent and brave, absorbing and vulnerable, The Quickening is another essential book from Elizabeth Rush.

Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

The Quickening

Katy Watkins

Where is the computer program that can calculate the heat sequestered by humility? That will account for the fact that my child will not be steeped in exactly the same myths I was— those self-serving fantasies about how it's my right to inherit the whole earth?

However, as I stare at the lopsided straggler, this slab of ice so diminished it's nearly gone, my enchantment with the idea that Antarctica's great glaciers are responding to us, to our actions thousands of miles away, by birthing bergs whose very bodies bear grave warning seems all wrong. Because, I wonder, how bad must things get for a parent to make such a sacrifice?

The Quickening quotes

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