LOGANIA – A Cold War relic unearthed during a secret military operation half a century ago under the Greenland ice sheet provided what scientists called “impressive” and potentially disastrous visions of the future of a global warming.
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. It wasn’t until 2017 that scientists rediscovered the sample in a freezer. They have now correlated this evidence with ice cores from other parts of Greenland to reach troubling conclusions.
Utah State University professor of geology Tammy Rittenour, who played a major role in the studies, called the results “shocking” because they suggest the entire Greenland ice sheet suffered a total collapse of at least two. times and is much less stable than scientists previously thought.
If it melts again, Rittenour believes the consequences could be catastrophic for humans around the world.
Aside from its scientific value, the Frozen Trials saga also has jaw-dropping elements that could come from a Cold War thriller.
“It’s a great story in a cold place,” said Rittenour, who described a top-secret military operation from the 1960s that literally took place inside the ice.
Camp Century: A hidden base for a secret purpose
The Greenland ice sheet is an amazing natural phenomenon, a giant slab of ice up to 1 mile 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 from ice and covered with snow and ice.
“A huge bunker could be dug 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 presenter Walter Cronkite even entered the ice sheet and toured Camp Century in 1960. Military officials portrayed him as a place of scientific research. Its true purpose was a highly classified military secret.
Known as Project Iceworm, the most 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 do it,” Rittenour said, “because it was cut into ice and the roof kept collapsing.”
Camp Century left behind a unique test for future scientists. In 1966, a huge drilling rig inside the base traversed the entire ice sheet, straight down nearly a mile, and even a few meters deeper, into lower sediments.
“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 discovered forgotten sand and ice in a freezer in Denmark. They were surprised 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.
.@ State_scienceTammy Rittenour has been chosen as an expert to help study the convicted ice core specimens of the 1960s @ United States Army nuclear launch site in Greenland. # Research in the USA#USUAggieshttps://t.co/JV5WDqazOS
– Utah State University (@USUAggies) December 19, 2019
In his obscure “Luminescence Lab” on the USU Innovation Campus, he bombarded the sand with lasers to measure its luminescent properties.
“And that tells us how old he is,” he 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. He said he was “shocked” to discover that the sand was exposed to sunlight less than a million years ago, possibly much less.
“Maybe only half a million or several hundred thousand years ago the ice sheet melted,” Rittenour said.
He said this implies that the ice sheet could be a little less stable than the scientists had assumed and that it could be subjected to melting 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 various clues, including glacial ice air bubbles around the world, scientists have drawn the rise and fall of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past millions of years. As CO2 decreased, the ice sheet grew. As CO2 increased, glacial ice began to melt. In the modern industrial age, atmospheric data show a dramatic increase, a seemingly unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide.
“Today (it is) far out of the natural range of CO2 concentrations,” Rittenour said.
In recent years, the Greenland ice sheet appears to be melting at an accelerated pace. If a total thaw occurs again, the oceans will rise by about 20 to 25 feet, much more so if Antarctica also melts. This endangers the lifestyle and lives of hundreds of millions of people in coastal towns, cities and cities around the world.
“If Greenland’s ice sheet melted,” Rittenour said, “all these coastal areas would be flooded, entire countries would be under water and most of the world’s population would be disturbed.”
The half-century ice core does not answer all questions or predict the future. More studies will come and this secret of the past, once buried under the ice, could tell us many things about the future of humanity.
“This is not a twenty-generation problem,” geoscientist Paul Bierman said in a press release from the University of Vermont study team. “This is an urgent issue for the next 50 years.”
Pictures
John Hollenhorst