What this secret nuclear base in Greenland can tell us about climate change
While Kovacs focused on his research, other men serviced the reactor or studied the movements of snow. At the bottom of the base, one team was busy drilling a hole deep into the ice. In 1966, after several years of steady labor, the men punched through the bottom of the glacier to the very surface of Greenland itself. They'd drilled more than 4,000 feet, gathering in the process the first ice core to ever penetrate an ice sheet. And almost on a whim they went farther too, collecting 11 and a half feet of ancient, frozen soil. They only stopped when a drill bearing burned out.
That soil would form one of Camp Century's most haunting legacies—though at the time no one thought much of it. For years after the base was abandoned, the soil was stored in jars in a freezer in Buffalo, New York, before being moved to a freezer in Denmark. There was little to suggest that something enlightening might be inside those jars—and few if any tools could help unlock their significance. It was only in 2019 that Paul Bierman, a geoscientist and professor at the University of Vermont, and several of his colleagues began to study the contents of the jars.
What they found has revolutionized our understanding of Greenland's ancient climate—and offered a glimpse of our own possible future. Trapped in the soil, Bierman's team discovered, were bits of leaves, twigs, mosses, even insects. The remains could only have come from a time when the region was free of ice, not smothered in a mile-thick glacier. The discovery painted a new picture of Greenland's past. 'There are things we can learn about ice sheets that we can never learn from the ice itself,' says Bierman. 'It comes from the stuff below the ice.'
The soil samples provoked a radical departure from earlier, vaguer thinking that Greenland's ice cap was a couple of million years old. Working with dozens of other scholars, Bierman showed that the ice cap was younger than anyone had imagined—the soil providing evidence that the land under Camp Century was ice-free about 400,000 years ago, during a period in which the landmass had been slightly warmer than it is today and when sea levels were significantly higher. What emerges from the data, he explains, isn't merely an image of the past but also, perhaps, a clearer vision of a future in which quadrillions of gallons of fresh water currently locked up in the Greenland ice cap melt into the ocean. If that happens, the impacts will be felt nearly everywhere, as coastal cities and farms are inundated, potentially turning billions of humans into climate refugees.
'It's easy to compartmentalize Greenland—to say, 'Oh, that's the Arctic. It doesn't matter to me,' ' says Bierman. But the long-forgotten soil from Camp Century draws a straight line to the critical issue of our age. 'It takes you from 1966 to global climate change and onward to the effects of Greenland's melting. That's pretty profound.'
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