LOGAAN – A relic of the Cold War that was unearthed under the ice sheet of Greenland during a secret military operation half a century ago, has given scientists ‘astonishing’ and potentially ominous insights into the future of a warming earth.
An international team of scientists announced their conclusions after studying a sample of ice and sediments that were captured in a drilling operation in the 1960s and then lost and forgotten. Only in 2017 did scientists rediscover the sample in a freezer. They are now correlating the evidence with ice cores from other parts of Greenland to draw worrying conclusions.
Geology professor Tammy Rittenour, Utah State University, who played a key role in the studies, called the findings “shocking” because they suggested that the entire Greenland ice sheet had a total breakdown at least twice and was much less stable. than scientists previously thought.
If it melts again, Rittenour believes the consequences could be disastrous for people around the world.
Apart from its scientific value, the saga of the frozen evidence also contains jaw elements that could have come from a cold war thriller.
“It’s a cool story in a cold place,” Rittenour said, describing a top-secret military operation from the 1960s that literally took place in the ice.
Camp Century: A Hidden Base with a Secret Purpose
The Greenland Ice Sheet is an astonishing natural phenomenon, a giant iceberg up to 1 kilometer deep that covers an area more than four times the size of California.
During the Cold War, Pentagon planners decided it was a perfect place to dig inside and create a military base known as Camp Century. Tunnels and large workspaces were cut out of the ice and covered with snow and ice.
“You could dig a big bunker under the ice sheet and no one would know,” Rittenour said in an interview on the USU campus. “It would be invisible from above.”
The base itself was not a secret; CBS anchor Walter Cronkite even entered the ice sheet in 1960 and toured Camp Century. Military officials portrayed it as a site for scientific research. Its real purpose was a highly classified military secret.
The top-secret plan, known as Project Iceworm, was to hide 600 mobile nuclear missiles under the ice and keep them ready for launch should the cold war with the Soviet Union suddenly turn into a hot war. Eventually, however, the Pentagon abandoned the plan.
“They had to,” Rittenour said, “because it was cut in ice and the ceiling collapsed.”
Camp Century has left a unique piece of evidence for future scientists. In 1966, a large drilling platform carved into the base through the ice sheet, straight nearly a mile, and even a few feet deeper, into sediments below.
“They collected it, looked at it and put it in a freezer and forgot about it,” Rittenour said.
Project Iceworm: Clues for Future Scientists
In 2017, scientists rediscovered the forgotten sand and ice in a freezer in Denmark. They were surprised to find petrified plants at the bottom of the ice core. Rittenour calls it a ‘treasure chest’ of evidence because it shows that the ice sheet must have melted away completely, two different times. Rittenour’s role was to determine how long this had been happening.
.@UStateScience‘s Tammy Rittenour has been appointed as an expert to help study iron core samples from a doomed 1960s @USArmy nuclear launch site in Greenland. #USUResearch#USUAggieshttps://t.co/JV5WDqazOS
– Utah State University (@USUAggies) December 19, 2019
In her obscure “Luminescence Lab” on the USU Innovation Campus, she bombarded the sand with lasers to measure its brightness properties.
“And it tells us how old it is,” she explained. “When it was last exposed to light.”
Rittenour said scientists had previously thought the ice sheet was stable for maybe two and a half million years. She said she was ‘shocked’ when she discovered that the sand was last exposed to sunlight less than 1 million years ago – possibly much less.
“Maybe only half a million or a few hundred thousand years ago that the ice sheet melted away,” Rittenour said.
She said this implies that the ice might be slightly less stable than scientists suspected and that it could melt over a relatively short period of time.
Meltdown: ‘An urgent problem for the next 50 years’
The findings have consequences for humans that can be catastrophic. Using various clues, including air bubbles of ice around the world, scientists have mapped the rise and fall of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past million years. As the CO2 decreased, the ice sheet grew. As the CO2 increased, ice began to melt away. In the modern industrial era, atmospheric data show a dramatic increase, apparently unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide.
“Today it is outside the natural range of the CO2 concentration,” Rittenour said.
In recent years, the Greenland ice sheet seems to be accelerating rapidly. If a total collapse occurs again, oceans are estimated to rise 20 to 25 feet – much more than Antarctica also melts. It threatens the lifestyles and lives of hundreds of millions of people in coastal towns, cities and cities around the world.
“If the Greenland ice melted,” Rittenour said, “all those coastal areas would be flooded, entire countries would be under water and most of the world’s population would be disturbed.”
The ice core of the half-century does not answer all the questions or predict the future. More studies are coming and this secret from the past, once buried under the ice, can tell us a lot about the future of mankind.
“This is not a twenty-generation problem,” geoscientist Paul Bierman said in a University of Vermont news release. “This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years.”
Photos
John Hollenhorst