The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Rush Narrated by Helen Laser

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/05/2023

In this searching meditation, Brown University writing teacher Rush (Rising) reflects on accompanying a 2019 research expedition to Thwaites, “Antarctica’s most important and least understood glacier,” as part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic writers program. She describes how the scientists and crew onboard the research vessel cope with heavy storms while analyzing samples of seafloor sediment and measurements taken by underwater gliders to understand how rising water temperatures are hastening the melting of “the widest glacier in the world.” Amid the alarming science, Rush ruminates on the “ethics of bringing more people into the world,” discussing her own desire to conceive in spite of anxieties about the planet’s future. Rush also includes extensive interviews with her shipmates in which they expound on the vicissitudes of conducting research at the bottom of the world (“Persistent uncertainty is something you get used to,” says one marine geophysicist) and how they decided to have or not have children. Rush’s reporting is top-notch, and her personal reflections make this an unusually intimate account of climate change. Readers will find plenty to ponder. Agent: Julia Lord, Julia Lord Literary Management. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Quickening 

“The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush’s new work of nonfiction, reframes the end of the world—geographical and climatological. [. . .] Alongside recitations of the science as well as meditations of a much more personal nature, the intrepid reader is treated to prose that lifts Rush’s work far above standard journalism.”—Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times

“Elizabeth Rush's The Quickening is one part memoir, one part reporting from the edge—think Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction—a book that feels as though it was written from the brink. In this case the extreme scenario is literal: Rush, a journalist, joins a crew of scientists aboard a ship headed for a glacier in Antarctica that is, like much of the poles, rapidly disappearing. The book brings the environmental crisis into a personal sphere, asking what it means to have a child in the face of such catastrophic change. [. . .] Rush writes with clarity and precision, giving a visceral sense of everything from the gear required to traverse an arctic landscape to the interior landscape of a woman facing change both global and immediate.”—Vogue, “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”

“[The Quickening] offers an exploration story that is also a literature of community, as attentive to the cooks and the marine techs as it is to the scientists whose work they support. [. . .] Ultimately Rush determines that the work of parenting, like the floating village of people studying the glacier, is paving the way for other, better futures.”—Rachel Riederer, Scientific American

“In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush takes readers to the precipice of the climate crisis. Aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, an American icebreaker, Rush and a crew of scientists, journalists, and support staff set bow and stern in front of Thwaites Glacier for the first time in history [. . .] The Quickening is a poignant, necessary addition to the body of Antarctic literature, one that centers—without glorifying—motherhood, uncertainty, community, vulnerability, and beauty in a rapidly melting world.”—Science

“[The Quickening is] a distinctive addition to the Antarctic canon. [. . .] Rush centers women’s voices in her exploration of motherhood and the Earth, gliding between her personal reflections, descriptions of life aboard the ship and stories of what comes after. Simultaneously lyrical and analytical, The Quickening depicts Rush’s search for meaning while rejecting easy answers.”—BookPage, starred review

“Elizabeth Rush takes readers along as she documents the 2019 Thwaites Glacier expedition in Antarctica. The voyage had 57 scientists, researchers and recorders onboard to document the groundbreaking glacier, which has never been visited by humans. [. . .] Rush ties her findings of the Thwaites Glacier expedition to raising kids and living in a quickly changing world.”—WBUR, “8 Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List”

“The fascinating inside story of climate science at the edge of Antarctica [. . .] In this follow-up to Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Rush shows us how data collection happens, capturing the intriguing details of climate science in the field [. . .] The scientists are not the only heroes of Rush’s book, which emphasizes above all the collaborative and interdependent nature of such voyages, where so much depends on the staff and crew. In addition to her own poetic voice, the author incorporates the voices of everyone on the ship, highlighting women and racial and ethnic minorities, who have been overlooked in the canon of Antarctic literature.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Rush’s reporting is top-notch, and her personal reflections make this an unusually intimate account of climate change. Readers will find plenty to ponder.”—Publishers Weekly

“Elizabeth Rush, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Rising, is no stranger to chronicling difficult narratives about climate change, and conveys profound urgency without ever descending into panic. In The Quickening, she turns that skill to a most daunting task: joining the crew of the Nathaniel B. Palmer and the team of scientists attempting to gather data from Antarctica's never-before-explored Thwaites Glacier. [. . .] As impressive as the structure is, it's at the sentence level that Rush's artistry shines, each description a pearl, and the string of them a thing of undeniable beauty. Rush is a journalist, with a scientist's curiosity and powers of observation, but she is also a poet, and sentences like this one demonstrate her formidable skills: 'I get the sense that all afternoon, I have been eavesdropping on a conversation that has been taking place over hundreds of years, a conversation whose language is material, written in ice and rock and bone.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review

"An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction."—Next Big Idea Club

"In 2019, a group of scientists set out for Thwaites Glacier, which has the ominous nickname of Doomsday Glacier, in the Antarctic. It had never been visited before by humans, and the goal was to gather as much information as possible. The glacier itself is suspected to be deteriorating, which could have catastrophic effects on sea levels.Rush not only documents the scientific journey and gives voice to various crew members, but also explores what it means to bring a new life into the world, as she starts to contemplate motherhood in the time of climate change."—Book Riot

“The Quickening took me on an immersive journey through both exterior and interior landscapes, deftly crossing the boundaries between the frigid Antarctic and the warm heart. Elizabeth Rush’s writing is multilayered, from fascinating scientific accounts to intimate human stories and deep examinations of how we live deliberately in a melting world.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush chronicles a months-long journey to the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica with scientists who are conducting research that will help us better understand how global warming is reshaping our planet. As with Rising, this book is beautifully written, deeply felt, and thoroughly researched. [. . .] Antarctica is a mysterious, terrifying, vast place and Rush captures all of it with genuine curiosity and intelligence. This book is at once a love letter and a meditation and a gentle warning—and we very much need all three.”—Roxane Gay, Goodreads

“The Quickening is the Antarctic book I've been waiting for—an immersive modern day expedition tale, a reflection on science and knowledge-making, a confrontation with gendered histories, and a brilliant writer's spellbinding meditation on human mistakes, distant goals, and courage.”—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning: A Novel

“The Quickening is about the end of a great glacier and the beginning of a small life. It is a book about imagining the future, and it is a book of hope.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

“Going to the Antarctic is an adventure, big science is an adventure, having a child is an adventure—and all of these adventurers are shaded by the great and tragic adventure of our time, the plunge into an ever-warmer world. So, this is an adventure story for the ages!”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Ranging from glaciers to what grows within, this journey to Antarctica is like none you’ve read before—delightful and devastating, profound and grounded, but most of all shimmering with life. The Quickening is a mesmerizing ode to the power of melting ice and the necessity of creation amid world-altering change. I cried and laughed from cover to cover.” —Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

“In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush offers readers a symphony of voices from the people who stand at the forefront of climate investigations, woven with the singular lyrical story about a woman’s embodied hope for the future. On a ship bound for the uncharted edge of the fragile Thwaites Glacier, experience an Antarctic voyage you’ve never heard before, about a warming world breaking apart, even as new life begins.” —Meera Subramanian, author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka

SEPTEMBER 2023 -- AudioFile

Helen Laser narrates with a thoughtful style, a smart cadence, and an empathetic tone. Author/environmentalist Elizabeth Rush weaves three strands together: an ocean adventure; her life with 57 others on the NATHANIEL B. PALMER, a research vessel traveling to Antarctica; and her personal struggle over whether or not to have a child.The title has a dual meaning, implying both seeing a glacier calving and feeling her own baby's first movement. Laser emulates the author's probing journalistic style when she interviews her shipmates on their experiences and captures Rush's personal struggle as she contemplates bringing a child into our environmentally compromised world. Laser vividly delivers Rush's thoughts and experiences, including an account of giving birth the year after she returned. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2023-04-17
An account of the first research voyage to the so-called Doomsday Glacier.

In 2019, Rush joined an international group of marine biologists, oceanographers, and geologists aboard a research vessel heading toward the calving edge of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. Because Thwaites sits partially below sea level, exposed to the Southern Ocean, it is vulnerable to warming seas and liable to contribute upward of 2 feet to sea-level rise. However, the rate of its disintegration is poorly understood. In this follow-up to Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore, Rush shows us how data collection happens, capturing the intriguing details of climate science in the field. The scientists’ goal is to “gain a clearer understanding of Thwaites’s past and present to better predict the future,” and the author brings us along as they send their submersible under the ice, take sediment samples from the ocean floor, gather the bones of penguins, and face down uncertainty and stormy seas. The scientists are not the only heroes of Rush’s book, which emphasizes above all the collaborative and interdependent nature of such voyages, where so much depends on support staff and crew. In addition to her own poetic voice (“the edges of Thwaites’s unfathomable fracturing, its hemorrhaging heart of milk”), the author incorporates the voices of everyone on the ship, highlighting women and racial and ethnic minorities, who have been overlooked in the canon of Antarctic literature. As Rush captures shipboard conversations about the planetary future evident in the data, she also weaves in what her fellow passengers are thinking about a quickening of another kind: Given everything we know about climate change, what are the ethical implications of having children? Considering all sides of the debate, Rush finds that “having children can be an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it.”

The fascinating inside story of climate science at the edge of Antarctica.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191179247
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Who knows when this all got started? When we became so tangled up in each other, in ice, in obsessing with endings already in motion and what it means to make a little life while the junk drawers overflow, and the jellyfish heap up on the shore, and the pollinator plants just keep blooming, even deep into October, long after the monarchs ought to be gone? What do we make of all that? What do we make amid all that? Each of us begins in our own way. And yet each of us begins the same.

The year I go to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is also the year I decide to try to grow a human being inside of my body. It is the year of becoming two: me and you. The year we all get onto that boat, my shipmates and I, the year we sail past 73° south to the untouched edge of Thwaites, is also just another year in which the ice lets go, a little more this time. Let’s agree to call it a year––like the Year of Magical Thinking or the Year of Living Dangerously––though let’s also agree that it may not coincide with anything that resembles a year on the calendar. It will not start and stop on a certain day, and there will not be 365 of anything. Instead time will flow sideways, the way floodwaters cover the lowest land first, and it will unspool quick as a metal cable lowering a scientific instrument down to the very bottom of the Amundsen Sea.

            On our last night on solid earth, many of us sleep in a hotel called Dreams. Everything we do anticipates what we will soon be without. Some call the children they are leaving behind. Some call credit card companies, to set up automatic payments. And some head to the Colonial for a couple of drinks. One person runs along Route 9 to stretch her legs, while another runs to the market to purchase deodorant and a couple empanadas. I go to the steam room just above the hotel’s casino. Then I go to the bar around the corner for my last pint, where I eye every person who enters, wondering if we will sail to Antarctica together. In the morning, I drink a glass of honeydew juice, followed by a glass of raspberry juice. I’m thinking: When am I going to drink fresh juice again? And, more importantly: Is this my last chance to be alone? 

      From my table at the breakfast buffet, I can see the Nathaniel B. Palmer tied to the pier. The research vessel looks like a winter slipper with the heel facing forward. The low stern flares into a wide bow with a relatively flat rake, so the boat can ride up on top of the sea ice we will soon encounter, forcing it to break. The Palmer’s hull appears as orange as the inside of a papaya, its superstructure egg-yolk yellow. The Ice Tower, a boxy room with windows on all sides, sits at the very top, a kind of crow’s nest for cold weather. Just beneath it: the bridge, where the officer on watch will oversee ship operations every single minute of every single day for the next nine weeks or more. Later, I will stand in that room and ask Captain Brandon how much the Palmer weighs and he will tell me 10,752,000 pounds. Yet I wouldn’t call the ship large. It’s roughly the length of a football field, a distance most humans can cross in under a minute without breaking a sweat. I squint through the hotel’s smudged window, sip my second cup of coffee, and realize that I know nothing about whatever it is that I’ve gotten myself into.

Nine months earlier, I received a cryptic missive from Valentine Kass, my program officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF). It read: An interesting opportunity has come up. Call me in the morning. A strong wind blew all night, stripping the cherry blossoms from the trees. Valentine didn’t wait for my response; instead she rang first thing to tell me that she had spent the previous day in a planning meeting for a five-year program to study Antarctica’s most important and least understood glacier, Thwaites.

“This year they’re deploying an icebreaker to investigate. There’s one berth remaining, and I recommended it be given to you,” Valentine said. Then she asked what was the longest I’d ever been on a boat. 

“Five days,” I told her, confident.

“Do you think you’re up for sixty?”

“Sure,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly.

“Where you’d be going, it’s incredibly isolated.” Valentine paused, as if waiting for me to signal comprehension. “For instance, it’s easier to send help to the space station than it is for us to get help to you, if you go. The Brits run Rothera, the nearest base, and it’s a four-day steam from the project site if the sea ice cooperates.”

“I understand,” I said, though I didn’t understand anything, not really.

I had been writing about climate change’s early impacts on vulnerable coastal communities for nearly a decade. During that time, I visited with hundreds of flood survivors, many of whom had lost family members and homes. I listened to their stories so that I might learn from them—and better communicate—how to navigate this time of profound transformation. That there was considerable variability in the current sea level–rise models was something I had come to accept. Would there be three feet of rise or six by century’s end? No one knew, and I, like those I interviewed, had to learn to live with this uncertainty.

But then I read an article about Thwaites and became uncomfortable again. If Antarctica is going to lose a lot of ice this century, it will likely come from Thwaites. That’s because the glacier rests below sea level, exposing its underside to warm-water incursions that are causing rapid melting from beneath. Thwaites alone contains over two feet of potential sea level rise, and were it to wholly disintegrate, it could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, causing global sea levels to jump ten feet or more. In terms of the fate of our coastal communities, this particular glacier is the biggest wild card, the largest known unknown, the pile of coins that could tip the scales one way or another. Will Miami even exist in one hundred years? Thwaites will decide.

At least that is what many scientists think, which is also why Rolling Stone dubbed Thwaites the “Doomsday Glacier” a couple years back. But no one has ever before been to Thwaites’s calving edge—the place where the glacier discharges ice into the sea—so many of our ideas about how it will behave are a mixture of science and speculation, out-of-date modeling married to increasing fear. The more we learn about Thwaites, the more profoundly we understand that many of our predictions about the speed of sea level rise are extremely tenuous, based primarily on physical processes that human beings have already observed. It is possible that at the cold nadir of the planet, in a place that no one has ever visited, let alone cataloged in the methodical way that science demands, one of the world’s largest glaciers is stepping outside of the script we imagined for it, defying even our most detailed projections of what is to come.

The possibility both haunted and intrigued me, so much so that I applied to the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers program with the strange hope of seeing some of this transformation firsthand. I wanted to stand alongside that massive glacier, wanted to witness freshly formed bergs dropping down into the ocean like stones, so that I might know in my body what my mind still struggled to grasp: Antarctica’s going to pieces has the power to rewrite all the maps.

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