What a top-secret military site in Greenland tells us about the future of climate change
What a top-secret military site in Greenland tells us about the future of climate change
A new book uncovers the climate warnings hidden in ice cores from a U.S. army base in Greenland.
Climate Solutions // ISSUE # 98 // HOTHOUSE
In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the United States started digging 2,500 miles of tunnels under the ice sheets of Greenland, hoping to one day store as many as 600 nuclear weapons on the island that it hoped to launch against Russia in the event of a nuclear war.
Denmark, to which Greenland belongs, had no idea of the secret military operation. It had, however, given the U.S. army permission to build a research facility on the island with the purpose of studying arctic conditions. The U.S. mission at Camp Century, as the site was know, was to test various different construction techniques in arctic conditions. To this extent, they succeeded and then some: scientists at the camp pioneered the art of extracting ice cores buried thousands of feet beneath the ice sheet and built one of the world’s earliest nuclear power reactors.
In 1966, the U.S. government abandoned the camp leaving the tunnels it dug to collapse as the island warmed from the effects of climate change. But Paul Bierman, the author of the newly-published When the Ice is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future (W. W. Norton & Company; Hardcover $27.99), is obsessed with the ice cores researchers retrieved from the facility. Bierman, a geologist and professor at the University of Vermont, examined these cores decades after the U.S. army left Greenland, and discovered fossils from a warmer, boreal Greenland about 400,000 years old. In other words, Greenland’s ice had vanished before, and for those who’ll listen, that vanishing has a warning about our current climate crisis.
In this interview, journalist Caroline Haskins speaks with Bierman about his book and the insights Greenland's scientific discoveries offer for tackling climate change in the future.
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What a top-secret military site in Greenland tells us about the future of climate change
A new book uncovers the climate warnings hidden in ice cores from a U.S. army base in Greenland.
By Caroline Haskins
CH: Why did you approach this book as a history as opposed to a popular science book about how ice core science works?
PB: I would call it an environmental history, and there's two ways to approach that. One is the way I'm trained as a geoscientist, which inevitably is a mix of history and process. The other is that I didn't want to write another ‘here's climate here's climate change, here's how to understand the tools’ book. I wasn't specifically writing this book to scientists. I was really writing this book to the broader public, and that's where the idea of solutions will come.
CH: I had no idea how crucial a role Greenland had as a weather station and a plane runway during World War Two. Was there a story or fact in your research that was particularly surprising?
PB: I’ve studied glaciers and ice sheets since 1981. I've done science in Greenland. But only through doing the research for this book do I realize the depth of involvement of both the military and the scientific community in the 50s and 60s.
In terms of the most surprising thing, I found [it was] how early people were worried about climate change. You get into the 1950s, and it's not just in the technical literature, it's in the newspapers. It's stunning how early they were worried about changing the climate.
CH: You mentioned various figures who either were lost in history or never written into history in the first place. Was there anyone who really stood out or connected with you?
PB:There are so many. I'll link two of them together.
The first one is Henri Bader, who is a Swiss man, a geologist by training. Very soon after the Army hires him to understand snow and ice, they put him in charge of this lab that's studying how snow and ice and permafrost behave. He has all these obscure papers and technical reports. You read them, and you go, ‘That’s what we're doing today.’ He wrote this in the 50s.
But the way he conducted himself was as or more important. He hired a woman in the 1950s by the name of Lucybelle Bledsoe, and she became a technical editor. She had a master's degree in English, and then she picked up doing scientific editing. She was responsible for the technical editing on pretty much every paper about Greenland from the mid 50s to 1966, when she died in a house fire.
What was stunning about Bader and Bledsoe and their interactions is that she was a lesbian in the 50s in the middle of the Lavender Scare, when even people like Dwight Eisenhower were worried about hiring homosexuals. Yet, Bader didn't just hire her, but hired a number of other gay women. When you start looking at the photo-archive hired a lot of Black men as engineers.
[Bader’s] very first [mentee] was a fellow named Gerry Wasserburg. He went on to date moonrocks, and is the most famous geologist out there. Wasserberg was Jewish. So in the 50s, he was supporting Black Engineers and scientists, homosexuals and Jews, all of whom were discriminated against.
CH: Arguably, the climax of the book is when you discover the ancient fossils in the ice cores that were sitting in a storage facility unexamined for decades. What was that like?
PB: It was the middle of summer. I was completely exhausted. I had just taught high school students for five days. I had a plane ticket to go to Cuba two days later. So I was cooked.
The first day, [the ice core shipment] came in. I was just staring inside one of these bins. Then all of a sudden, something snapped. I'm like, wait, there’s stuff floating around in here. There shouldn't be stuff floating around. This is from the bottom of the glacier.
I looked over at [researchers] Drew and Leah and said, ‘I think there are fossils in here.’ They looked at me like, ‘You are completely and utterly out of your mind.’
I handed it to Drew and I said, put this under the microscope. There's about 10 seconds of dead silence, maybe 20. Then he looks up with this string of what I've always described as happy expletives. He's like, ‘You are right – there are leaves and there are twigs and there are bits of moss in here.’
We were literally just babbling at each other, and looking in the other bins, and realizing that every one of these bins had things floating in it.
The next thing we did was we called in the high school kids and said, ‘You guys see this? We have fossils from below the Greenland ice sheet.’ The kids are like, ‘Okay, that's cool, but you guys are a little crazy.’
CH: I was struck by when you talked about melting ice sheets, and you included a quote comparing that to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, as a gradual loss of knowledge. When you think about exciting research that could come out of future ice core research, are there any scientific questions that come to mind?
PB: The idea that ice cores were a book that could be read — I would now supplement with, I think the next great book to read is what's underneath the ice. We've only read a couple pages of that so far.
If we had another 5, 6, 7 sections or chapters of that book, we'd understand a whole lot more of the last couple million years, especially the warm times when the ice was gone. It's those warm times that we care about right now, because that's where we're headed.
CH: You mentioned that the scientists who developed the technology to extract and study ice cores didn't think that it would be possible until they did it. You compare that to the technology that would remove carbon from the atmosphere. Could you expand on that?
PB: I don't think we can depend on carbon removal from the atmosphere. We need to start with decarbonizing our current economies. I am really hopeful about that. If you look at the cost graphics, coal is crashing, and wind and solar are taking off.
At the same time, we're trying to come up with novel technologies that will capture carbon and store it, and that is a very poorly developed field right now. There are experimental plans. None of that technology is mature right now. But the time scale to do some of these pretty amazing pieces of technology has been the order of a decade or two, which is why I still come away with faith.
CH: We have pretty profound political difficulties and the US both in terms of acknowledging climate change and funding climate change research. Where do you see the path forward?
PB: If you get down to the level of citizens, a bunch of those differences are illusions. They are cudgel welded by the wielded by the people in power.
You go to Florida, the hurricane damage is extreme. The governor of Florida is very far to the right, and doesn't even want the words climate change mentioned. But at a local level, people are affected by these rapid intensification of storms, wetter, longer lasting hurricanes and higher winds.
At some point, I just have to hope our national politics cools down. There really are examples in American history, not that far back, where there wasn't this division over a major environmental issue. I would love to know how we get back to that again.
CH: I was wondering if reading that history about the Army’s nuclear power plant at Camp Century influenced the way that you think about nuclear power at all?
PB: It was an amazing piece of technology, designed and built in about two years, and it mostly worked. That reactor was a mess, and was buried somewhere in Idaho right now because it was so radioactive. There's probably some radioactivity, probably not a lot left, up in the ice sheet from it.
That said, nuclear power absolutely has a place in our future. Right now, we want to reduce carbon, or carbon footprint. It is baseload power. We’ve got to get away from these monstrous, incredibly expensive power plants that we have built, and think more flexibly and think differently. I don't know if nuclear power will come back, but to me, it seems really foolish if we have working nuclear power plants that we can run safely with engineering controls.
CH: What role do you think that economic degrowth has in that conversation about rapidly decarbonizing our economy, to slow the rate of warming?
PB: Infinite growth is impossible. I can say, as a geoscientist, the Earth is only so big. We only have so many resources. So this idea that our world economies have to keep growing is, to me, a complete fallacy.
So why don't we focus on not growing, but doing better in our lives? Do we need huge cars? Do we need huge houses? Do we need to have people living in extremely cold and extremely warm zones where they have to condition the environment all the time?
CH: You note that we have to start planning our infrastructure around anticipated effects of climate change. Are there any specific cities or projects that you see as forward-looking?
PB: There's great proposals for the margins of Manhattan, which would also be raised a little bit so there's less flooding. Most of it is band aids at this point, seeing pictures of houses in New Orleans being raised up on stilts.
We have to think about what's going to happen if we indeed get a meter of sea level by 2100, which is totally plausible. If you melt the bulk of the Greenland ice sheet, which would take centuries to a thousand plus years, you will see sea level rise of 20 to 25 feet.
We worry about migration now in the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. What if migration, all of a sudden is 400 million or 500 million people? That's really, truly frightening, and we are not planning for that right now.
CH: Is there a thing that you hope people take away from your book?
PB: I hope they realize the global interconnectedness of all the places in which we live.
I also hope they realize that not everything the military did was awful. I'm not a militaristic person, but I am so impressed with what as an organization. There were some amazing people working with far fewer tools than we have right now. I learned a lot of respect for my holders and predecessors, and I hope people will take some of that away from the book.
Then just the sheer wonder of it all. The wonder of people crossing an ice sheet on foot, and then sleeping in an ice sheet. Imagine what it would have been like building a nuclear reactor, in the middle of an ice sheet, and making it run. The sheer wonder of looking at a brown handful of dirt, and finding fossils that tell you about an ecosystem that existed 400,000 years ago.
This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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