LOGAN – A Cold War relic unearthed in a covert military operation half a century ago beneath the Greenland ice sheet provided what scientists called “stunning” and potentially ominous insights into the future of a warming Earth.
An international team of scientists released their conclusions after examining a sample of ice and sediments collected during a drilling operation in the 1960s and then lost and forgotten. It wasn’t until 2017 that scientists discovered the sample in a freezer. They have now correlated that evidence with ice cores from other parts of Greenland to draw worrying conclusions.
Utah State University geologist Professor Tammy Rittenour, who was instrumental in the studies, called the findings “shocking” because they suggest that the entire Greenland ice sheet has completely collapsed at least twice and is much less stable than scientists previously thought. .
If the weather melts, Rittenour believes the consequences could be disastrous for people around the world.
Aside from its scientific value, the saga of the frozen evidence also contains breathtaking 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 amazing natural phenomenon, a gigantic slab of ice up to a mile deep that covers an area more than four times the size of California.
During the Cold War, the Pentagon planners decided it was a perfect place to dig in and create a military base known as Camp Century. Tunnels and large work areas were carved out of the ice and covered with snow and ice.
“You could dig a huge 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 no secret; CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite even took to the ice sheet and toured Camp Century in 1960. Military officials portrayed it as a place for scientific research. Its true purpose was a highly classified military secret.
Known as Project Iceworm, the top secret plan 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. But in the end, the Pentagon abandoned the plan.
“They had to,” said Rittenour, “because it was cut into ice and the ceiling kept collapsing.”
Camp Century has left unique evidence for future scientists. In 1966, a massive base drilling rig drilled all the way through the ice sheet, nearly a mile, and even a few feet deeper, down into sediments.
“They collected that, looked at it, put it in the 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 amazed to find petrified plants at the bottom of the ice core. Rittenour calls it a “treasure trove” 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 ago that happened.
@UniLeidenTammy Rittenour’s been hired as an expert to help study ice core samples from a doomed 1960s @Army nuclear launch site in Greenland. #USUResearch# USUAggieshttps://t.co/JV5WDqazOS
– Utah State University (@USUAggies) December 19, 2019
In her darkened “Luminescence Lab” on the USU Innovation Campus, she bombarded the sand with lasers to measure the luminescent properties.
“And that tells us how old it is,” she explained. “When it was last exposed to light.”
Rittenour said scientists previously thought the ice sheet had been stable for perhaps 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 it was only half a million or a few hundred thousand years since the ice sheet melted,” Rittenour said.
She said it implies that the ice sheet may be slightly less stable than scientists had assumed and could melt in a relatively short period of time.
Meltdown: ‘An urgent problem for the next 50 years’
The findings have implications for the human race that could be catastrophic. Using a variety of clues, including bubbles from glacial ice around the world, scientists have charted the rise and fall of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past million years. When the CO2 dropped, the ice sheet grew. As CO2 increased, glacial ice began to melt away. In the modern industrial age, atmospheric data shows a dramatic spike, a seemingly unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide.
“Today (it is) far beyond the natural range of CO2 concentrations,” said Rittenour.
In recent years, the Greenland ice sheet appears to be melting at an accelerated rate. If there is another total meltdown, oceans will rise an estimated 6 to 7 meters – much more if Antarctica also melts. That threatens the lifestyles and lives of hundreds of millions of people in coastal villages, cities and towns around the world.
“If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt,” Rittenour said, “all those coastal areas would be flooded, entire countries would be flooded and most of the world’s population would be disrupted.”
The half-century-old ice core does not answer all questions or predict the future. More studies are coming, and this secret from the past, once buried under the ice, could tell us a lot about the future of humanity.
“This is not a twenty-generation problem,” geoscientist Paul Bierman said in the University of Vermont press release. “This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years.”
photos
John Hollenhorst