We did it!\/We\u2019re here! Chang and I are the first New York Times journalists to reach the Thwaites Glacier, but the Times has a long history of Antarctica reporting. Chang and I have made it to Thwaites! We\u2019re the first New Yo rk Times reporters to make it! It feels like a good opportunity to look back at Times reporters who came before me and reported from Antarctica. Chang and I have made it to the Thwaites – the first New York TImes journalists to reach the glacier. But the Times has a long history of Antarctica reporting. Before I left I dug into the archives. Before the trip I dug into the archives Before leaving I dug into the archives. These pages represent 100 years of the New York Times in Antarctica. The first New York Times reporter to report from Antarctica was Russell Owen, who joined a US Navy commander, Richard Byrd, for 14 months between 1928 and 1930. And the Times called him the world\u2019s first polar reporter. The Times didn\u2019t have a photographer on the Byrd expedition, but a documentary film did capture the exploration Owen was the only reporter there. So it was an exclusive, a 14 month exclusive. His dispatches are still so vivid today. \u201cByrd mushes over the ice barrier.\u201d And this story\u2019s about Commander Byrd leaping into the water to save one of his men. There\u2019s a lot of action here. I think certainly at the beginning of the 20th century, it was just still this remote, unknown, inhospitable, uninhabitable place. A place that humans hadn\u2019t conquered and developed in the same way.. That was the story that the New York Times was reporting on back then. And then, of course, over the decades that changed. 00:48:21:02 – 00:48:33:11 In the 1950s and 60s, the New York Times science reporter Walter Sullivan also took several trips to Antarctica, bringing back a number of his own photos from the trip, as well. 00:51:58:20 – 00:52:27:11 So this is one of Walter Sullivan\u2019s stories from 1955 from Antarctica. And we already see a lot of attention to scientists at work. They\u2019re taking cores of sediment from the seafloor. Malcolm Brown was another New York Times science reporter who made a number of trips to Antarctica in the last decades of the 20th century. The caption on this Malcolm Brown story from 1974 is \u201cStudies are in progress to determine whether the Antarctic ice cap is deteriorating.\u201d So that\u2019s half a century ago, this was already top of mind for scientists in Antarctica. So the first scientists to really focus specifically on Thwaites and the glaciers around it published papers in the late 70s. They called it the potential \u201cweak underbelly\u201d of the Antarctic ice sheet. Antarctica\u2019s melting ice is already raising global sea levels. And if global warming isn\u2019t stopped, it will continue doing so for centuries to come And yet Now we have the tools. We have the capabilities to really not just understand this threat, but maybe even get ahead of it. OUTRO 1: That\u2019s what this trip is about – these scientists are trying to study the Thwaites ice from all angles – including underneath – to see what mitigation efforts might help TKTK The hope on this expedition is do just that – to find ways to mitigate the threat TKTKTK The scientists on this expedition want to do just that. And tktk.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/History_Thumb_02-1--jumbo.png\")
Our climate reporter Raymond Zhong takes a trip into the New York Times archives to see how our understanding of Antarctica has changed over the past century.<\/p>\n
By Raymond Zhong, Kassie Bracken, Christina Thornell, David Seekamp, Stephanie Swart, Phil Caller, Chang W. Lee and Nikolay Nikolov<\/p>\n
January 18, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"new video loaded: A Century of The New York Times in Antarctica transcript Back transcript A Century of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":526180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,812,191549,83514,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,233664,15353,233665,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-526179","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-antarctica","10":"tag-climate-changeglobal-warming","11":"tag-glacier","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-russell-owen","19":"tag-the-new-york-times","20":"tag-thwaites-glacier","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-united-states-of-america","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115918677396680648","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}