The pilot banked to the right, then more gently to the left, beginning a wide lazy turn. Below them as they stared down was the familiar image of Antarctica as seen in satellite photos, but everything was now brilliantly colored and articulated: the cobalt blue of the ocean, the daisy chain of cyclonic cloud systems spinning away to the north, the textured sheen of the sun on the water, the great gleaming mass of the ice, and the flotillas of tiny icebergs, so white in the blue.

But the familiar Q shape of the continent was now strangely mottled in the area behind the comma of the Antarctic peninsula, with gaping blue-black cracks in the white. And the Ross Sea was even more fractured, by long ocean-blue fjords, and a radial pattern of turquoise-blue cracks; and offshore from the Ross Sea, floating up toward the South Pacific, were some tabular icebergs that were like pieces of the continent itself, sailing away. The biggest one looked to be about the same size as New Zealand’s South Island, or even bigger.

After they had pointed out the biggest tabular bergs to each other, and the various features of the broken and reduced western ice sheet (the geologist indicated where he thought the volcano under the ice was, but it looked no different from the rest of the sheet), they simply sat in their seats and watched.

“That’s the Ronne ice shelf, there,” the geologist said after a while, “and the Weddell Sea. Yeah, there’s some slippage down into it too. . . . Up there’s where McMurdo used to be, on the far side of the Ross ice shelf. Ice was pushed across the bay and ran up over the settlement.”

The pilot started a second lap around the continent.

Fort said, “Now say again what effect this will have?”

“Well, theoretical models have world sea levels rising about six meters.”

“Six meters!”

“Well, it will take a few years for the full rise, but it’s definitely started. This catastrophic break will raise sea levels about two or three meters, in a matter of weeks. What’s left of the sheet will be afloat in a matter of months, or a few years at most, and that will add another three meters.”

“How could it raise the whole ocean that much?”

“It’s a lot of ice.”

“It can’t be that much ice!”

“Yes it can. That’s most of the fresh water in the world, right down there under us. Just be thankful the East Antarctic ice sheet is nice and stable. If it were to slide off, sea levels would rise sixty meters.”

“Six meters is plenty,” Fort said.

They finished another lap. The pilot said, “We should be getting back.”

“That’s it for every beach in the world,” Fort said, pulling his face back from the window. Then: “I guess we’d better go get our stuff.”

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