Captain Oliver Kruess pilots his cruise ship — the National Geographic Explorer — through the flows. Antarctic adventure tourism has become big business. But he says something happens to the people who come down here.”Initially, many of them come for the seals, for the penguins, for the whales,” Kruess  told CBS News senior foreign correspondent Mark Phillips in a report for “Down to Earth” by CBS News on Facebook Watch. “But when they return to Antarctica, they come for the ice — the shape of the icebergs, the sea-ice set up, the ship in the ice.”
“So much of the earth’s fresh water is sequestered here in Antarctica in that huge ice mass that’s frozen there,” NASA scientist John Sonntag said. “A good way to think of both Greenland and Antarctica is as a gigantic mountain of ice. They’re not just thin layers of ice and rock, they’re gigantic mountains of ice, two to three miles thick so that’s a lot of sea level that’s locked up in these ice sheets.”Scientists on NASA’s ice-survey flights have confirmed that more ice melts into the sea each year than gets added back to the ice cap through snowfall.”There are several spots around here, around Antarctica, that are believed to be in this irreversible situation, where the ice on the ground is going to flow into the sea and there’s nothing we can do to stop it at this point,” said Ken Taylor, an ice scientist who has been studying the changes in Antarctica for years.The consequence is “inevitable sea level rise,” Taylor said. “There’s at least three feet already locked in down here in Antarctica.”Also inevitable is the threat to low-lying coastal areas around the world that the sea-level rise will cause.  It may take decades for that to happen, but it will happen. The more the darker sea-water is exposed, the faster the sunlight warms it, the faster the adjoining ice melts.In the meantime, NASA’s program of ice measuring flights is coming to an end. A new satellite will take over a lot of the scientific work. But further investment is in doubt because the United States’ chief executive remains a climate change skeptic.”What about the scientists who say it’s worse than ever?” Lesley Stahl asked President Donald Trump on the Oct. 14, 2018, edition of CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”