The Ice Worms - 270

 "Ice Worms," you may say, "What next?" This column is not about real ice worms, although ice worms do exist. I know this because I was on the side of an Alaskan Glacier and said to my friend, "It is time to eat a little ancient ice." She replied, "I hope you enjoy ice worms with your ice."

"What kind of silliness are you talking about, ice worms?", I responded. She pointed out the worms, and my thirst slacked. Surprisingly, there are a lot of these creatures that thrive at 32F on glaciers. Every living thing has its comfort zone. If it gets too cold, they freeze and die. If they warm, they decompose. Somehow, where nothing else can hack the program, ice worms survive.

This column is not about real ice worms but something just as interesting, human ice worms. It is about a super-secret sub-glacial military base under the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The operation was called "Operation Ice Worm," named after the little fellas I just mentioned. The base, named Camp Century, was so secret our military did not ask permission from Denmark to build it. The Danes, when they found out, were a little miffed but I am not going to go into any detail about the controversy other than the fact we left 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel, a nontrivial quantity of PCBs, 6 million gallons of untreated sewage, and a pile of nuclear waste when we abandoned the base.

There is nuclear waste at Camp Century because when it was built in 1959, it was powered by the PM-2A mobile atomic reactor. The coolant for the PM-2A becomes radioactive. All this was left when the base was closed in 1967 and later abandoned.

The United States was motivated to build the base because we were in the era of the nuclear arms race. The Camp Century complex plan was to eventually grow to be miles of interconnecting ice tunnels, creating a vast complex of subsurface nuclear missile launching sites.

What did this base have to do with the study of climate change? The military does scientific research. In this case, they drilled ice cores down through 4550 feet to the bottom of the ice cap…and then another 12 into the dirt. While the ice cores are an invaluable source of climate history, it is the last 12 feet from which scientists have recently been able to tease out an astonishing fact.

It is terrific these soil samples are available for analysis today. It is a tribute to the science community who have protected these cores. Army scientists gave the cores to the University at Buffalo in the 1970s. Later, the cores were given to the University of Copenhagen in the 1990s.

Researchers recently became interested in what the last 12 feet could tell the world about Greenland and how fragile Greenland's Icecap is. The previous age estimate of the Icecap was 2.5 million years. This previous estimate led to the assumption the Ice Cap was old and stable and would continue to be stable.

The 12 feet of dirt, tundra plants, and feldspar packed away in Danish Cookie Jars in the University of Copenhagen freezers tell us a different story. Through dating techniques, which analyze feldspar luminescence and isotopes of Beryllium and Aluminum, scientists inform us that the Icecap under the abandoned Camp Century is only 416,000 years old.

This is an astonishing and disturbing discovery. The analysis of air bubbles trapped in the ice cores 4550 feet down and just above the tundra dirt has the concentration of carbon dioxide pegged at 288 parts per million. Today, we are at 422 ppm and climbing. Since the earth's temperature goes up with more ppm of CO2, we can make the intelligent and conservative bet the Greenland Ice Cap will melt off entirely if we do not do something.

This inconvenient discovery means humans should start planning for a 5 to 20-foot rise in sea level. Since we have raised the sea level less than one foot since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and coastal communities are experiencing the resulting tidal and storm surge from that rise, these communities and cities must prepare to meet the rising threat. They will need help to adapt.

Thanks to the Army Ice Worm Scientists who lived and worked literally within the Icecap, the lab caretakers who kept these samples safe and frozen, and the research scientists who have discovered ways to date these samples, we now have fair warning above and beyond the climate model predictions already proven accurate by the current rise in world temperature and ocean rise.

The science community will drill many more ice cores in Greenland to verify what our Military Ice Worms dug up in the 50s and 60s. But, if we are wise, we will start to heed lead scientist Paul Bierman's advice: "We use the past to try to understand the future and understand the present, and that makes the future a little frightening. Not that we should run from it—but to me, it's a call for action."

We can act by electing and educating our political leaders with the evidence at hand. In turn, they will create policies to lower greenhouse gas emissions and create plans to assist our coastal cities to adapt.

 

Primary reference: Science Magazine Vol 381 No 6655 

Secondary references: Wired Magazine July 2023 "An Abandoned Arctic Military Base Just Spilled a Scientific Secret”                                                                                                     

 CNN July 2023 “Long-lost Greenland ice core suggests potential for disastrous sea level rise”

Wikipedia searches of "Camp Century," "Operation Ice Worm," and "Ice Worms."