A relic of the Cold War dug up during a secret military operation a half-century ago under 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 announced their conclusions after studying a sample of ice and sediments 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 that evidence with ice cores from other parts of Greenland to reach worrisome conclusions. Utah State University geologist professor Tammy Rittenour, who played a significant role in the studies, called the findings "shocking" because they suggest that the entire Greenland ice sheet suffered a total meltdown at least twice and is much less stable than scientists previously thought. If it melts again, Rittenour believes the consequences could be catastrophic for humans around the globe. Apart from its scientific value, the saga of the frozen evidence also has jaw-dropping 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 1960's military operation that took place literally inside the ice.
Camp Century: A hidden base with a secret purpose
The Greenland ice sheet is an astonishing natural phenomenon, a gigantic 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 burrow inside and create a military base known as Camp Century. Tunnels and large workspaces were carved from the ice and covered over with snow and ice. "You could dig out a huge bunker underneath 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 not a secret; CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite even went into the ice sheet and toured Camp Century in 1960. Military officials portrayed it as a site 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 if the cold war with the Soviet Union suddenly turned into a hot war. Eventually, though, the Pentagon abandoned the plan. "They had to," Rittenour said, "because it was cut into ice and the ceiling kept collapsing."
The obvious question is, if the entire ice sheet melted away completely over a half-million years ago, it seems impossible to blame that warming on human-caused actions..
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