The Cold War secret project has given birth to plants that once thrived under Greenland’s deep ice for miles

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A long-lost core of earth, drilled from miles of thick ice in northwest Greenland in the 1960s, has shown that for the past 1 million years – and perhaps even 400,000 years ago – it has once been home to a vegetated landscape. .

Scientists had expected to find sand and rocks in the dirt, but were instead surprised to see twigs and leaves.

“We found parts of frozen plants – twigs, leaves and moss – that are similar to the Arctic tundra found in the few ice-free areas of Greenland today. The biggest difference between then and now is that the ice sheet covering this part of Greenland must have melted, “said Andrew Christ, a Gund postdoctoral fellow and geology lecturer at the Gund Institute for the Environment at the University of Vermont.

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

The discovery is more evidence of a new and worrying understanding that the Greenland ice sheet has completely melted in a recent warm period in Earth’s history – periods that are no different from what we are today – and that are accelerating. with global warming caused by man.
“In the last million years, the Earth’s climate has been punctuated by relatively short warm periods of about 10,000 years called interglacials, when there was less ice at the pole and sea level was higher. We think it’s possible that one of those interglacials, possibly around 1 million years ago or 400,000 years ago, it was the last time this part of Greenland melted and the tundra grew on the landscape, “said Christ, lead author of the study published Monday in the journal PNAS .
It shows a river winding in Greenland.

Iceworm project

The material analyzed in the study has a unique and interesting story. It came from Camp Century, a Cold War military base dug into the ice sheet above the Arctic Circle 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 army presented the camp as a polar science station. The military mission failed and the ice and dirt cores they collected were moved from one place to another in cookie jars. The tests took place at Buffalo University in upstate New York in the 1970s, before being moved to another freezer in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the 1990s. The cores stayed there for decades until they were moved to a new freezer and accidentally rediscovered in 2017.

With the latest dating techniques, scientists have been able to analyze the perfectly preserved plant sediment and fossils. The research team dated them to the last million years.

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

“I used two different techniques. First, we used clean room chemistry and a particle accelerator to count the atoms that form in rocks and sediments when exposed to natural radiation that bombards the Earth. Then, a colleague used an ultra-sensitive method to measure the light emitted from sand grains to determine the last time they were exposed to sunlight. Both methods tell us how long the ancient soil was buried under ice, “Christ explained by e-mail.

Sharing what happened last time Greenland was warmer than it is today is essential, as the ice sheet is believed to contain up to 7 meters (23-feet) of sea level rise – a change in sea level. which could flood many big cities around the world.

“In the geological past, it would have taken thousands of years to melt the ice cap. We are rapidly warming the climate at a rate that exceeds anything observed in the last million years.

“This is a concern for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the significant rise in sea level during our lifetime and certainly in the lives of our grandchildren.”

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