Jeannie Kever at the website of the University of Houston:
Julia Wellner and other crew members for this year’s Thwaites Glacier Offshore Research Project stepped onto the deck of the research vessel/icebreaker (RV/IB) Nathaniel B. Palmer in January, leaving from a crowded pier in Punta Arenas, Chile, and sailing to west coast of Antarctica.
They returned to a near-deserted port more than two months later, remaining offshore until it was time to travel directly to the airport and home. But while the rest of us were working from home and sheltering in place, Wellner, her fellow researchers and a group of students – 59 people in all – were in a quarantine of a different sort, surrounded by ice and gathering data to build more accurate models of future sea level rise and climate change.
They rescued a fishing boat trapped in the ice and discovered a previously unknown island, too.
More here.