LOGAN – A Cold War relic unearthed during a covert military operation half a century ago under the ice sheet of Greenland has provided what scientists have called “amazing” and potentially ominous prospects for the future of an Earth that is heats up.
An international team of scientists announced their findings after studying a sample of ice and sediment that was 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 have now correlated this evidence with ice cores in other parts of Greenland to reach worrying conclusions.
Utah State University geologist Tammy Rittenour, who played a significant role in the study, called the findings “shocking” because she suggests the entire Greenland ice sheet has melted at least twice and is much less stable than scientists previously thought.
If it melts again, Rittenour believes the consequences could be catastrophic for people around the world.
In addition to its scientific value, the saga of frozen evidence also has elements that tip the jaws, which could have come from a Cold War thriller.
“It’s a cool story in a cold place,” Rittenour said, describing a secret military operation in the 1960s that literally took place inside the ice.
Camp Century: a hidden base with a secret purpose
The Greenland ice sheet is an amazing natural phenomenon, a giant ice sheet up to a mile deep that covers an area more than four times larger than California.
During the Cold War, Pentagon planners decided it was a perfect place to bury themselves inside and create a military base known as Camp Century. The tunnels and large workspaces were carved out of ice and covered with snow and ice.
“You could dig a huge bunker under the ice and no one would know,” Rittenour said in an interview on the USU campus. “It would be invisible from above.”
The base itself was no secret; CBS director Walter Cronkite entered the ice sheet and toured Camp Century in 1960. Military officials described it as a place of scientific research. Its true purpose was a highly classified military secret.
Known as Project Iceworm, the secret plan was to hide 600 mobile nuclear missiles under the ice and keep them ready for launch if the cold war with the Soviet Union suddenly turned into a hot war. Eventually, however, the Pentagon abandoned the plan.
“They had to,” Rittenour said, “because it was cut in the ice and the ceiling continued to collapse.”
Camp Century has left behind a unique proof for future scientists. In 1966, a huge drilling rig inside the base was completely wound up in the ice layer, almost a kilometer down and even a few meters deeper, in the sediments below.
“They picked it up, looked at it and put it in a freezer and forgot about it,” Rittenour said.
Iceworm Project: Clues for future scientists
In 2017, scientists rediscovered forgotten sand and ice in a freezer in Denmark. They were amazed to find fossilized plants at the bottom of the ice core. Rittenour calls it a “treasure” of evidence because it shows that the ice sheet must have melted completely, twice as differently. Rittenour’s role was to determine how long this happened.
.@UStateScienceTammy Rittenour was chosen as an expert to help study ice core specimens from a convicted 1960s @American Army nuclear launch site in Greenland. #USUResearch#USUAggieshttps://t.co/JV5WDqazOS
– Utah State University (@USUAggies) December 19, 2019
In the dark “Luminescence Lab” on USU’s innovation campus, she bombarded the sand with lasers to measure its luminescent properties.
“And that tells us how old it is,” she explained. “When was it last exposed.”
Rittenour said scientists previously believed the ice sheet had been stable for probably two and a half million years. She said she was “shocked” to discover 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 the ice sheet melted,” Rittenour said.
She said it implies that the ice sheet could be somewhat less stable than scientists had assumed and could melt in a relatively short amount of time.
Meltdown: “An urgent issue for the next 50 years”
The findings have implications for the human race that could be catastrophic. Using various clues, including air bubbles in glacial ice around the world, scientists have developed an increase and decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last million years. When CO2 decreased, the ice sheet increased. As CO2 increased, glacial ice began to melt. In the modern industrial age, atmospheric data show a dramatic, seemingly unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide.
“Today (it is) far outside the natural range of CO2 concentrations,” Rittenour said.
In recent years, the ice sheet in Greenland seems to be melting at an accelerated pace. If a total melt occurs again, the oceans will rise about 20 to 25 feet – much more so if Antarctica melts. This threatens the lifestyle and lives of hundreds of millions of people in villages, towns and coastal cities around the world.
“If the ice sheet in Greenland melted,” Rittenour said, “all those coastal areas would be flooded, whole countries would be underwater and most of the world’s population would be disturbed.”
The half-century-old ice core does not answer all the questions, nor does it predict the future. More studies follow and this secret from the past, once buried under the ice, could tell us a lot about the future of humanity.
“This has not been a problem for twenty generations,” said geoscientist Paul Bierman in a press release from the University of Vermont study team. “This is an urgent issue for the next 50 years.”
Photos
John Hollenhorst