A forgotten Cold War experiment has revealed its icy secret. It’s bad news for the planet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/15/greenland-ice-sheet-more-vulnerable/
Source: By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post. Excerpt: At first, Andrew Christ was ecstatic. In soil taken from the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet, he’d discovered the remains of ancient plants. Only one other team of researchers had ever found greenery beneath the mile-high ice mass. But then Christ determined how long it had been since that soil had seen sunlight: Less than a million years. Just the blink of an eye in geologic terms. And it dawned on him. If plants once grew at multiple spots on the surface of Greenland, that meant the ice that now covers the island had entirely melted. And if the whole Greenland ice sheet had melted once in the not-so-distant past, that meant it could go again. ...The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that the biggest reservoir of ice in the Northern Hemisphere can collapse due to relatively small increases in temperature over a long period of time. That makes it even more vulnerable to human-caused warming, which is causing the Earth to warm faster now than at any other period in its history. ...If the island’s entire ice sheet were to melt..., global sea levels would rise by more than 20 feet. ...The story of this soil sample is almost as dramatic as the data it contains. It comes from the bottom of an ice core taken during “Project Iceworm,” a failed Cold War effort to hide nuclear missiles beneath Greenland’s ice. Camp Century, in the far northwest of Greenland, was to be a base for the U.S. military project. Housing, dining and medical facilities, all powered by a nuclear reactor, were dug into the ice....
Source: By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post. Excerpt: At first, Andrew Christ was ecstatic. In soil taken from the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet, he’d discovered the remains of ancient plants. Only one other team of researchers had ever found greenery beneath the mile-high ice mass. But then Christ determined how long it had been since that soil had seen sunlight: Less than a million years. Just the blink of an eye in geologic terms. And it dawned on him. If plants once grew at multiple spots on the surface of Greenland, that meant the ice that now covers the island had entirely melted. And if the whole Greenland ice sheet had melted once in the not-so-distant past, that meant it could go again. ...The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that the biggest reservoir of ice in the Northern Hemisphere can collapse due to relatively small increases in temperature over a long period of time. That makes it even more vulnerable to human-caused warming, which is causing the Earth to warm faster now than at any other period in its history. ...If the island’s entire ice sheet were to melt..., global sea levels would rise by more than 20 feet. ...The story of this soil sample is almost as dramatic as the data it contains. It comes from the bottom of an ice core taken during “Project Iceworm,” a failed Cold War effort to hide nuclear missiles beneath Greenland’s ice. Camp Century, in the far northwest of Greenland, was to be a base for the U.S. military project. Housing, dining and medical facilities, all powered by a nuclear reactor, were dug into the ice....