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Pursuant to this plan, in the summer of 1959 the Army Corps of Engineers was dispatched to build a base. Situated at seventy-seven degrees north latitude, about a hundred and fifty miles east of Baffin Bay, Camp Century was by far the biggest thing ever erected on—or within—the ice sheet. Using what were essentially giant snowblowers, the Corps dug a network of subsurface passages, which connected dorms, a mess hall, a chapel, a movie theater, and a barbershop. There was even a subglacial dispensary that sold perfume to send back home. (A favorite camp joke was there was a girl behind every tree.) Powering the enterprise was a portable nuclear reactor.
Camp Century was the one part of Project Iceworm the Army advertised. The base, it maintained, had been built to conduct polar research, and the Army produced a promotional film chronicling the herculean effort made by the Corps. Getting construction materials in from the coast required convoys of special tractors that labored across the ice at two miles an hour. “Camp Century is a symbol of man’s unceasing struggle to conquer his environment,” the narrator of the film intoned. Reporters were taken on tours through the tunnels, and two Boy Scouts—one American, one Danish—were invited north for a stay.
No sooner had construction been completed, though, than Camp Century’s troubles began. Ice, like water, flows. The Corps knew this and had built the dynamic into its calculations. But the Corps hadn’t adequately factored in the human factor—the way heat from the reactor would speed up the process. Almost at once, the tunnels started to contract. To keep the dorms, the movie theater, and the mess hall from being crushed, crews had to continually “trim” the ice with chainsaws. One visitor to the base compared the racket to the annual general meeting of all the devils of hell. By 1964, the chamber housing the reactor had deformed so much, the unit had to be removed. In 1967, the whole base was abandoned.
One way to gloss the Camp Century story is as another Anthropocene allegory. Man sets out to “conquer his environment.” He congratulates himself for his resourcefulness and derring-do, only to find the walls closing in. Drive out nature with a snowblower, yet she will always hurry back.
But that’s not the reason I’m telling it. Or at least not the main reason.
Camp Century may have been a Potemkin research station; still, actual research was conducted there. Even as the tunnels warped and buckled, a team of glaciologists set about drilling straight down through the ice sheet. The drilling team pulled up long, skinny cylinders of ice and kept going until they hit bedrock. The cylinders—more than a thousand in all—constituted the first complete Greenland ice core. What it revealed about the history of the climate was so puzzling and unlikely that scientists are still trying to make sense of it.
I first read about Camp Century when I was planning a trip of my own to Greenland. I had arranged to visit a Danish-led drilling operation called the North Greenland Ice Core Project, or North GRIP for short. The operation was situated on top of two miles of ice, in a spot even more remote than Camp Century. To get there, I hitched a ride on a ski-equipped C-130 Hercules, which those in the know call a Herc. The flight was carrying several thousand feet of drilling cable, a team of European glaciologists, and Denmark’s minister of research. (Greenland is a Danish territory, a fact the U.S. Army cheerfully ignored in planning for Iceworm.) Like the rest of us, the minister had to sit in the Herc’s hold, wearing military-issue earplugs.
One of North GRIP’s directors, J. P. Steffensen, greeted us when we disembarked. We were dressed in huge insulated boots and heavy snow gear. Steffensen had on a pair of old sneakers, a filthy parka that was flapping open, and no gloves. Tiny icicles hung from his beard. First he delivered a short lecture on the dangers of dehydration. “It sounds like a complete contradiction in terms,” he told us. “You’re standing on three thousand meters of water. But it’s extremely dry. So make sure you have to go and pee.” Then he briefed us on camp protocol. There were two frost-proof toilets from Sweden, but men were kindly requested to relieve themselves out on the ice, at a spot designated by a little red flag.
North GRIP was a decidedly modest affair. It consisted of a half dozen cherry-red tents arrayed around a geodesic dome that had been purchased, mail order, from Minnesota. In front of the dome, someone had planted the standard jokey symbol of isolation—a milepost showing the nearest town, Kangerlussuaq, to be five hundred miles away. Nearby stood the standard jokey symbol of the cold—a plywood palm tree. The view in all directions was exactly the same: an utterly flat expanse of white that could be described as bleak or, alternatively, as sublime.
Beneath the camp, an eighty-foot-long tunnel led down to the drilling room. This chamber had been hollowed out of the ice, like the passageways at Camp Century, and inside it, the temperature, even in June, never rose above freezing. Again as at Camp Century, the chamber was shrinking. Pine beams had been installed to reinforce the ceiling, but they’d already shattered under the weight of the snow. Drilling began every morning at 8 a.m. The first task of the day was to lower the drill, a twelve-foot-long tube with fierce metal teeth on one end, down to the bottom of the borehole. Once in position, the toothy tube was set spinning, so that an ice cylinder gradually formed within it. The cylinder was then pulled up by means of a steel cable. The first time I watched the process, a glaciologist from Iceland and another from Germany were manning the controls. At the depth they had reached—nine thousand six hundred and eighty feet—it took an hour just for the drill to descend. During that time, there wasn’t much for the pair to do except watch their computers, which sat on little heating pads, and listen to ABBA. “The word ‘stuck’ is not in our vocabulary,” the Icelander told me, with a nervous laugh.
Like all glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet is made up entirely of accumulated snow. The most recent layers are thick and airy, while the older layers are thin and dense, which means that to drill down through the ice is to descend backward in time, at first gradually and then much more rapidly. About a hundred and forty feet down, there’s snow dating from the American Civil War; some twenty-five hundred feet down, snow from the time of Plato; and at a depth of five thousand three hundred and fifty feet, snow from when prehistoric painters were decorating the caves at Lascaux. As the snow is compressed, its crystal structure changes to ice. But in most other respects, it remains unchanged, a relic of the moment it formed. In the Greenland ice, there’s volcanic ash from Tambora, lead pollution from Roman smelters, and dust blown in from Mongolia on ice age winds. Every layer contains tiny bubbles of trapped air, each a sample of a past atmosphere. To someone who knows how to read them, the layers are an archive of the sky.
Eventually, the drill team pulled up a short section of core—about two feet long and four inches in diameter. Someone went to fetch the minister, who arrived in the chamber wearing a red snowsuit. The section looked a lot like a two-foot-long cylinder of ordinary ice. But, one of the drillers explained, it was made up of snow that had fallen over a hundred and five thousand years ago, at the beginning of the last ice age. The minister exclaimed something in Danish and seemed suitably impressed.
The first person to realize just how much information could be gleaned from an ice core was a geophysicist named Willi Dansgaard. Dansgaard, who was also Danish, was an expert on the chemistry of precipitation. Presented with a sample of rainwater, he could, based on its isotopic composition, determine the temperature at which it had formed. This method, he realized, could also be applied to snow. When Dansgaard heard about the Camp Century core, in 1966, he applied for permission to analyze it. He was more than a little surprised when it was granted. The Americans, he later wrote, didn’t seem to realize what a “gold mine” of data they had in their refrigerated vault.
In its broad outlines, Dansgaard’s reading of the Camp Century core confirmed what was already known about climate history. The most recent ice age, known in the United States as the Wisconsin, began roughly a hundred and ten thousand years ago. During the Wisconsin, ice sheets spread over the northern hemisphere until they covered Scandinavia, Canada, New England, and much of the upper Midwest. Throughout this period, Greenland was frigid. When the Wisconsin ended, roughly ten thousand years ago, Greenland (and the rest of the world) warmed.
The details were a different matter. Dansgaard’s analysis of the core suggested that in the midst of the last ice age, the climate of Greenland was so variable it could hardly be called a climate. Average temperatures on the ice sheet had, it appeared, shot up by as much as 8°C—more than 14°F—in fifty years. Then they had dropped again, almost as abruptly. This had happened not just once but many times. A temperature swing of 14°F? It was as if New York City had suddenly become Houston, or Houston had become Riyadh, and then flipped back again. Everyone, including Dansgaard, was perplexed. Could these violent swings in the data correspond to real events? Or did they represent some kind of glitch?
Over the next four decades, five more cores were extracted from different parts of the ice sheet. Each time, the wild swings showed up. Meanwhile, other climate records, including pollen deposits from a lake in Italy, ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea, and stalagmites from a cave in China, revealed the same pattern. The temperature swings became known, after Dansgaard and a Swiss colleague, Hans Oeschger, as Dansgaard–Oeschger events. There are twenty-five such D–O events recorded in the Greenland ice. Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State, has compared the effect to watching “a three-year-old who has just discovered a light switch, flicking it back and forth.”
The last great swing took place as the ice age was ending, and it was a doozy. Temperatures in Greenland shot up by 15°F in a decade, or perhaps even faster. Then things settled into a new and very different regime. For the next ten thousand years, temperatures in Greenland (and the rest of the world) remained more or less constant, decade after decade, century after century.
All of civilization falls within this period of relative tranquility, and so this sort of calm is what we take to be the norm. It’s an understandable mistake, but still a mistake. Over the last hundred and ten thousand years, the only period as stable as our own is our own.
One night at North GRIP, I interviewed Steffensen in the geodesic dome. It was midnight but polar day, so outside the sun was shining. The glaciologists were drinking beer, playing board games, and listening to the soundtrack from Buena Vista Social Club.
I brought up the issue of climate change. Perhaps, I suggested hopefully, it would ward off another ice age and more D–O events. At least we could dodge that particular disaster!
Steffensen was unimpressed by my suggestion. He pointed out that if you believed the climate to be inherently unstable, the last thing you’d want to do is mess around with it. He recited an old Danish saying, whose pertinence I didn’t entirely understand but which nonetheless stuck with me. He translated it as, “Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.”
We got to talking about climate history and human history. In Steffensen’s view, these amounted to more or less the same thing. “If you look at the output of ice cores, it has really changed the picture of the world, our view of past climates and of human evolution,” he told me. “Why did human beings not make civilization fifty thousand years ago?
“You know that they had just as big brains as we have today,” he went on. “When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture, they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial—ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it’s amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago, it would have started then. But they had no chance.”
I was contemplating another trip to Greenland, where Steffensen and his colleagues were drilling a new ice core, when COVID-19 hit. Suddenly everyone’s plans were upended, including my own. As borders closed and flights were canceled, travel to the ice sheet—or, for that matter, pretty much anywhere—became impractical. Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn’t finish the book.
Scientists are still trying to puzzle out what caused the wild temperature swings first glimpsed in the Camp Century core. One hypothesis is that they are related to a loss of sea ice in the Arctic, which is worrisome, given that global warming is causing a loss of sea ice in the Arctic. But even putting aside the possibility of a human-induced D–O event, the calm of the last ten thousand years is clearly coming to an end. Without intending to, or even realizing it, humanity has used the stability it lucked into to create Greenland-scale instability.
Since 1990, temperatures on the ice sheet have risen by almost 3°C (more than 5°F). During the same period, ice loss from Greenland has increased sevenfold, from thirty billion tons a year to an average of more than two hundred fifty billion tons a year. Melt is occurring over more and more area and at higher and higher elevations: during an exceptionally warm couple of days in the summer of 2019, melting was detected on more than ninety-five percent of the ice sheet’s surface. That summer—a record-breaker—Greenland shed almost six hundred billion tons of ice, producing enough water to fill a pool the size of California to a depth of four feet.
“The current Arctic is experiencing rates of warming comparable to abrupt changes, or D–O events, recorded in Greenland ice cores,” a team of Danish and Norwegian scientists recently reported. Since the melt process is self-reinforcing—water is dark and absorbs sunlight, while ice is light-colored and reflects it—there’s widespread concern that Greenland may be approaching the point beyond which the disintegration of the entire ice sheet becomes inevitable. This could take centuries—even millennia—to play out, but, all told, there’s enough ice on Greenland to raise global sea levels by twenty feet.
As with temperatures, sea levels have in the past varied dramatically. At the end of the Wisconsin, as the great ice sheets were breaking up, there were periods when they rose at the astonishing rate of a foot a decade. (It’s been proposed that one of these “meltwater pulses” inspired the account of the deluge in Genesis.) Obviously, our ancestors dealt with this tumult, or we wouldn’t be here. But, in contrast to us, they traveled light. How—and where—would you relocate a city like Boston or Mumbai or Shenzhen? Private ownership, national boundaries, subway lines, transmission cables, sewage pipes—all these are relatively recent developments in human society, and they all militate against picking up and moving. In this sense, just about every coastal city is, like New Orleans, committed to stasis and to the costly and increasingly elaborate interventions that maintaining stasis will require. To combat rising sea levels and the more deadly storm surges that they bring, the Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building a series of artificial islands in New York Harbor. These would be connected by six miles of huge retractable gates. An early cost estimate for the project ran to more than $100 billion. Alternatively, it’s been proposed that sea-level rise could be slowed by propping up Antarctic ice shelves or by blocking the mouth of one of Greenland’s largest outlet glaciers, the Jakobshavn ice stream.
“We understand the hesitancy to interfere with glaciers,” the authors of this proposal—scientists from the United States and Finland—observed in Nature. “As glaciologists, we know the pristine beauty of these places.” But “if the world does nothing, ice sheets will keep shrinking and the losses will accelerate. Even if greenhouse-gas emissions are slashed, which looks unlikely, it would take decades for the climate to stabilize.”
First you speed up an ice stream; then you try to slow it down by erecting a three-hundred-foot-tall, three-mile-long concrete-topped embankment.
This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds—these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances. As one replicant in Blade Runner says to Harrison Ford, who may or may not be playing a replicant: “You think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?”
It’s in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be “entirely crazy and quite disconcerting,” but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of “the pain and suffering away,” or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn’t it have to be considered?
Andy Parker is the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which works to expand the “global conversation” around geoengineering. His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”
But to imagine that “dimming the fucking sun” could be less dangerous than not dimming it, you have to imagine not only that the technology will work according to plan but also that it will be deployed according to plan. And that’s a lot of imagining. As Keutsch, Keith, and Schrag all pointed out to me, scientists can only make recommendations; implementation is a political decision. You might hope that such a decision would be made equitably with respect to those alive today and to future generations, both human and nonhuman. But let’s just say the record here isn’t strong. (See, for example, climate change.)
Suppose that the world—or just a small group of assertive nations—launched a fleet of SAILs. And suppose that even as the SAILs are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a return to the climate of pre-industrial days or to that of the Pliocene or even that of the Eocene, when crocodiles basked on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.