On January 25, a research cruise set off from Chile on the US Antarctic Program’s Nathaniel B. Palmer, a US icebreaker bound for the Amundsen Sea, remaining in the area until late March 2020. The expedition supports the THOR and TARSAN projects, by surveying and collecting sediment cores from the seabed and tagging seals to acquire ocean current and temperature data. The scientists will not set foot on the glacier itself, but rather will study the output of the glacier and the ocean that it flows into—the sediments it drops to the ocean floor, the water temperatures under the glacier and more—in order to reconstruct the history of glacier changes in the area and to improve the reliability of the ice sheet models that are used to predict future sea level change.