The future of coastal cities around the world depends on what happens to the thick sheet of ice that covers West Antarctica. 

Thwaites Glacier is the linchpin of that entire ice sheet. It's melting fast, and if it collapses, it could trigger some 11 feet of sea level rise. Scientists fear this collapse may have already started. 

This winter The World's environment reporter Carolyn Beeler spent two months embedded on a research vessel in Antarctica with scientists racing to better understand Thwaites. She lived with them on an icebreaker as they studied the glacier's past to try to predict its future. And she's now one of the few people on Earth to have seen this remote glacier.

Learn more about this story here and get started on the first episode here

Join us for an evening of photos, video and audio from Carolyn's reporting in Antarctica, as well as her stories from the front lines of climate change.

Carolyn Beeler covers the environment for The World, where she focuses on stories about people and places impacted by climate change. She has reported from all seven continents, most recently during a two-month research expedition to Antarctica, and won national and regional awards for her breaking news and in-depth feature reporting. Before joining The World she helped launch the weekly health and science show The Pulse at WHYY in Philadelphia, and reported from Berlin for a year as a Robert Bosch Foundation fellow. She got her start in radio as a Kroc fellow at NPR.