This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two Decembers ago, Erin Pettit layered up, slapped on goggles, cued up an audio book, and went on a hike--across Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Behind her, she dragged a sled loaded with a ground-penetrating radar, which fired pulses through a thousand feet of ice and analyzed the radio waves that bounced off the seawater below, thus building a detailed image of the glacier beneath her feet. Pettit--a glaciologist and climate scientist at Oregon State University--hiked alone through the snow, sometimes eschewing headphones for the absolute auditory stillness of the most remote landscape on Earth. "It was actually kind of an amazing, meditative field season," she says, "I just bundled up, I went out there and pulled my sled, and just walked for miles and miles."

Two Decembers ago, Erin Pettit layered up, slapped on goggles, cued up an audio book, and went on a hike--across Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Behind her, she dragged a sled loaded with a ground-penetrating radar, which fired pulses through a thousand feet of ice and analyzed the radio waves that bounced off the seawater below, thus building a detailed image of the glacier beneath her feet. Pettit--a glaciologist and climate scientist at Oregon State University--hiked alone through the snow, sometimes eschewing headphones for the absolute auditory stillness of the most remote landscape on Earth. "It was actually kind of an amazing, meditative field season," she says, "I just bundled up, I went out there and pulled my sled, and just walked for miles and miles." In case you were worried, her colleagues always knew where Pettit was; every so often someone would roll out on a snow machine to bring her supplies or to swap out the radar's battery.

Antarctica's Thwaites glacier has warm water from three directions well under it threatening to destroy the ice sheet and raise global sea levels by up to two feet. A team of scientists from Oregon State University made the most of ice free waters in West Antarctica to look under the glacier - which is about the size of Great Britain. Warm water from the deep ocean is welling up under the glacier from three different directions and mixing under the ice, the researchers discovered. If it collapses it could take other parts of the ice shelf with it and lead to the single largest driver of sea-level rise this century, lead researcher Erin Pettit told Nature. The £39million study involving UK and US scientists was launched after concerns the increasingly unstable glacier may have already started to collapse.

Many employers are using internships, boot camps and other after-school programs to net promising candidates before they earn their degrees, chief information officers say. "We regularly engage with students to help build brand awareness and candidate pipelines," said Ashley Pettit, CIO at State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. The Bloomington, Ill., insurer has about 6,000 technology workers, she said, and a recent online career fair it organized attracted more than 3,000 job seekers. Ms. Pettit was one of 30 information-technology executives who responded via email to CIO Journal's annual end-of-year questionnaire about hiring and other issues. CompTIA, an IT trade group, estimates that--despite ebbs and flows in the job market--the number of U.S. tech jobs is expected to grow 13.1% by 2026 from 2016, compared with 10.7% for all occupations.

Toronto resident Simon Treadwell wheeled a garbage bin onto a snow-bound lot next to his property one evening this past winter. Inside the bin was a smelly mixture of wet and dry cat food, sardines, and fried chicken. Treadwell sprinkled some of the mix on and around the bin, made sure his three motion-activated night vision cameras were on, and went back into his house. Treadwell was testing a new lid latch he had devised in response to the city of Toronto's request for proposals: The city needed help keeping raccoons out of people's garbage. For over a decade, residents had been asked to place organic compostable materials such as vegetables, meat, bones, and even paper towels into green bins.