A top secret from the Cold War project has spawned plants that once thrived under the depths of Greenland ice

A top secret from the Cold War project has spawned plants that once thrived under the depths of Greenland ice

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A lost nuclear core drilled from northern Greenland under kilometers of ice in the 1960s has shown that in the last 1 million years – and perhaps as recently as 400,000 years ago – it was once home to a vegetated landscape.

Scientists expected to find sand and rock in the dirt, but were rather surprised to see twigs and leaves.

“We found frozen plant parts – twigs, leaves and mosses – similar to Arctic tundra, which occur today in the few ice-free areas of Greenland. The biggest difference between then and now is that the miles of ice that had to melt away this part of Greenland be, ‘says Andrew Christ, a Gund postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in geology at the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont.

“The landscape was probably littered with small ponds and streams while tundra plants covered the landscape.”

The discovery is further proof of a new and disturbing notion that the Greenland ice sheet has completely melted during a recent hot period in Earth’s history – periods that are no different from the ones we are currently in – and is accelerating with global warming.
“Over the past million years, the Earth’s climate has been suppressed by relatively short warm periods of about 10,000 years, called interglacial, when there was less ice at the poles and sea levels were higher. We think it is possible that one of those interglacials, possibly about 1 million years ago or 400,000 years ago, were the last time this part of Greenland melted and grew tundra on the landscape, ” Christ, lead author of the study, published Monday in the journal PNAS, said.
Shown is a meandering river in Greenland.

Project Iceworm

The material analyzed in the study has a unique and intriguing story. It comes from Camp Century, a military base during the Cold War that was dug inside the ice shelf in the 1960s.

Called Project Iceworm, its real mission was to hide 600 nuclear missiles under the ice near the Soviet Union.

As cover, the military offered the camp as a polar science station. The military mission failed and the ice and dirt core they collected was brought in cookies from place to place. The samples were spent at Buffalo University in New York State in the 1970s before being moved to another freezer in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the 1990s. This is where the cores sat for decades until they were moved to a new freezer and accidentally rediscovered in 2017.

Using the latest dating techniques, scientists were able to analyze the sediment and the perfectly preserved plant fossils. The research team has dated them within the last million years.

Engineers with the Cold and Region Research and Engineering Laboratory capture an ice core in Camp Century, Greenland, ca. 1966

“We used two different techniques. First, we used clean room chemistry and a particle accelerator to count atoms that form in rocks and sediment when exposed to natural radiation that bombards the earth. Then a colleague had an ultra-sensitive “method used to measure the emitted light of sand grains to determine the last time it was exposed to sunlight. Both methods tell us how long the ancient soil was buried under ice,” Christ explained in an email.

It is critical to work together that was last time that Greenland was warmer than the current one, because the ice sheet presumably contains up to 7 meters (23 feet) sea level rise – a shift in sea level that could flood many large cities around the world .

“In the geological past, it would have taken thousands of years to melt the ice sheet. We are rapidly warming the climate at a rate higher than the observation of the past million years.

“It is a concern to melt the Greenland ice and significantly increase the sea level within our lifetime and certainly our grandchildren’s lifetime.”

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