MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump says he wants control of Greenland because it's crucial for America's national security. It's also crucial for science. An ice core - a cylinder of ice drilled out of a glacier decades ago - helps us understand climate change. Jay Price of member station WUNC has this report.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: Last year, NASA scientists aboard a small jet above the Greenland ice sheet were testing a sophisticated form of radar. It picked up something mysterious - crumpled structures, about 100 feet under the surface.
WILLIAM COLGAN: It's sort of the ground zero or birthplace of ice core drilling and in some ways, paleoclimate research as a whole.
PRICE: That's Glaciologist William Colgan, a professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. He's talking about an abandoned military base called Camp Century, which has a notorious Cold War history, but also a pivotal place in the history of science. The camp was so unusual, it needs some explaining. It was built under the ice, about 150 miles inland. In a stroke of Cold War creativity, the U.S. Army wanted to test whether a base under the ice hidden from the view of the Soviets was feasible.
(SOUNDBITE OF US ARMY FILM "CAMP CENTURY")
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Today, Camp Century is being operated as a year-round arctic research center. As part of man's efforts to probe deeper and deeper into the secrets of the universe, an elaborate program of tests and experiments is being carried out.
PRICE: An Army video from 1964, some of those tests were top secret. Christian Nielsen teaches science history at Aarhus University in Denmark.
CHRISTIAN NIELSEN: Alongside the main tunnels of Camp Century, been removed, there was a semicircular tunnel where they installed railroad tracks.
PRICE: It was a project that would have hidden 600 nuclear missiles, rail lines to move them, and up to 11,000 troops, all in thousands of miles of tunnels under the ice cap. The idea was eventually abandoned, as was Camp Century. But one of the experiments performed there has been key for climate science. An ice core, nearly a mile long, drilled at Camp Century gave scientists the first lengthy and detailed record of the Earth's climate. Again, Glaciologist William Colgan.
COLGAN: So before the Camp Century core, we did not really have a reliable way of looking into the Earth's past climate. When the U.S. pulled out the Camp Century core in 1966, it provided a window into the past like people had never known before.
PRICE: Instead of relying on, say, a century or so of data on weather, we now had records all the way back beyond the last glacial period.
COLGAN: And I think it was a real change in how people think about Earth's history and climate history. When they published the core record, they used the phrase 1,000 centuries of climate record from Camp Century, because I don't think people are used to thinking in millennia.
PRICE: He still travels there about once a year to run tests and service instruments that are gathering data. Because various kinds of research there were started so early, the site remains important.
COLGAN: It's sort of become a science super site on the ice sheet. Because of the deep core record that was pulled out of there and the other measurements that were made in the '60s, people keep coming back and resurveying things against these baseline measurements.
PRICE: Those instruments are, in some sense, all that remains of Camp Century, which as the NASA flight found, has been buried ever deeper under decades of snow and ice.
COLGAN: Of course, when you go to the site today, you don't see anything. It looks like any other site on the ice sheet, just flat white snow and a blue sky.
PRICE: But Colgan, who knows the history of the ice there, can see things. He says, the Army picked the site in part because the surface ice never melted - what's called dry snow, which is easier to dig into. Now though, the scientists have noticed that it melts a little almost every year. Camp Century's ice is still talking to us 60 years later. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Durham, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE'S "ELK RIVER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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