For several years now, climate scientists have been studying “grounding lines”—the point at which a large glacier is buoyant enough to detach from the seafloor and become a floating ice shelf—in order to track the effects of global warming and predict future changes to the world’s coastlines. But only in recent months have they (in this case, a team from Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and their handy “robotic oceanographer” Icefin) actually been able to capture video footage of the grounding zone of the Thwaites Glacier, part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where it’s steadily leaking freshwater into the ocean. We now have, in other words, a direct time-based visual of sea levels rising before our very eyes, far from myths, theories, or long-term abstractions.