Other Voices

Sarah Slack — here, on the deck of the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer — says science teachers who taught her at Farnsworth Middle School and Guilderland High School shaped her into the explorer and teacher she became. “Our job is not just what we talk about in the classroom,” says Slack, who teaches eighth-grade science, technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM, at The Montauk School in Brooklyn, but, rather, modeling “who we are as people.” In this week’s podcast, Slack talks about her most recent sojourn — to Antarctica where she worked with professors and graduate students to map the seafloor under the edge of the Thwaites Glacier. Called the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites, which is about the size of Florida, is melting more than other glaciers because of warm currents below. “It is a stopper, holding back four other glaciers,” said Slack. If Thwaites were to melt, sea levels would rise two feet, said Slack, and, if those four other glaciers melted, too, sea levels could rise another catastrophic 13 feet. Throughout her journey, Slack stayed in touch with her eighth-grade students through a blog and relished answering their questions. Her last post features a picture taken shortly after the icebreaker where she had lived left the Drake Passage, known as the roughest water in the world, causing Slack to be seasick — it is a picture of a rainbow.