Two days after Christmas, the Times journalists Raymond Zhong and Chang W. Lee set sail from Christchurch, New Zealand, on a research vessel bound for Antarctica. They’ve been there ever since, traveling with an international team of scientists on a high-stakes expedition to study the continent’s most unstable glacier.

They’ve sent back gripping dispatches (that’s Ray’s job) and amazing images (Chang captures those). Their work documents the scientists’ research and lives, as well as the austere, beautiful and sometimes terrifying vistas around them. Thwaites, the glacier the scientists are studying, is a mass of ice that’s roughly the size of Florida. The research is meant to help us understand how long it will be before it melts away, lifting sea levels around the world.

Reporters from The Times have covered Antarctica for the better part of a century, and not from afar. (That’s my job.) Russell Owen was on the continent for 14 months in the late 1920s, writing almost daily about a milestone expedition led by Richard E. Byrd, then a U.S. Navy commander. Later trips by Times reporters, most recently in 2016, brought our readers stories of discovery and science on and in the ice.

Ray and Chang have it pretty good, Ray told me yesterday when we caught up on a video call from the ship: good food, warm bunks, strong internet, an easy commute to work. Still, he said, it’s Antarctica. Things go wrong.

Over the weekend, Ray reported, the expedition suffered a significant setback when instruments the scientists were lowering down a half-mile hole in the glacier got stuck and then froze over. The idea had been to moor them in the sea below the glacier to monitor the warming water that’s causing the glacier to slough ice and disappear. It was a gutting moment for the crew, Ray told me yesterday. As he wrote, “A project almost a decade in the making had crumbled at the final stage.”