Confidential Cold War Project Rewrote Greenland's Past and Gives Warnings About The Future

Fossils unearthed from a forgotten ice core by researchers rewrite Greenland's past.

In 2019, Andrew Christ busy and stressing over his dissertation was made to help examine a sample of Greenland's ice core drilled decades ago. The core comprised of subglacial sediments and rocks was taken from a mile down of is in 1966 at Camp Century.

In 1959, the US Army Corps of Engineers scouted Greenland for Camp Century, which was named due to the original intent of being built 100 miles from the edge of Greenland's ice caps. It was an American research base that served as a covert location for a confidential and failed military project.

Since being drilled from beneath the ice sheet, the ice core sample had been separated from the rest of the core, crisscrossed the Atlantic waters, and was lost but only until today has it ever been analyzed.

Analyzing Freeze-Dried Fossils

Christ says that the sample ice core miraculously stayed frozen and researchers jumped at the opportunity to melt the sample sorting through sediments and washing it off for further analysis. This is when Christ notes black floating specks in the water.

Placing the unknown specks under a microscope, Christ was stunned to realize that they were freeze-dried fossils of plants mixed with the sediments giving definitive evidence that Greenland, a million years ago, was completely ice-free.

The discovery paved the way for a paper to be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled, "A multimillion-year-old record of Greenland vegetation and glacial history preserved in sediment beneath 1.4 km of ice at Camp Century"

Joerg Schaefer, co-author of the study and a climate geochemist at Columbia University says that the findings are more than simply academic curiosity but have a direct implication on the future of our planet.

Together with materials analyzed in 2016 by Shaefer and colleagues, researchers concur that Greenland's ice sheet is unstable.

The Greenland Ice Sheet Misconception

Researchers have long believed that Greenland's ice sheets, which are 2 miles thick in certain areas, were a permanent blanket covering the island for more than two million years.

However, the subglacial sample from Camp Century confirms that the massive ice sheet can melt far more easily than what early models suggest. The melting of Greenland's ice sheets would add enough water to raise global sea levels by up to 20 feet, wiping out major cities like Boston and London right off the map.

William Colgan, a climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark not involved in the study, explains that the findings are a critical reminder that the Greenland Ice Sheet can completely disappear with the level of climate warming being projected over the next century.

The polar regions of the Earth are warming faster than the rest of the world, with models suggesting a rise of at least 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the next century.

Together with the 2016 study, the new Camp Century findings show that an increase in temperature is enough to melt the ice sheet and cause catastrophic sea-level rises. Colgan adds that the Greenland Ice Sheets are remarkably climate-sensitive.

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