When the Ice Is Gone by Paul Bierman

Author:Paul Bierman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

There is something otherworldly about material from the bottom of an ice sheet, material collected more than a half century ago, material that most people had years ago given up on ever finding. Looking at these samples, you wouldn’t know why—they were brown, sandy, and badly freezer-burned bits of soil, any one of which you could hold in the palm of your hand. Vanished both from people’s minds and from ice-core storage facilities, which usually know exactly what samples they hold and how to find them, these cylinders of frozen soil had now almost magically reappeared. Eleven and a half feet of sediment from the bottom of the ice sheet had been hiding in plain sight, safe in Copenhagen in a pair of old, brittle brown cardboard boxes labeled “Camp Century sub-ice.”

That afternoon, our group (rapidly shrinking as people ran to catch trains and planes to head home) talked about what to do next. We agreed that test samples were in order. We’d start with the bottom and the top of the sub-ice sediment core. The Danes would cut us small pieces of these two parts of the core, keeping the rest as an archive. They would ship those pieces to Vermont, in an insulated box lined with cold packs designed to keep ice cores frozen for several days. Once they arrived in our lab, we’d melt most of each sample, recover the water and sediment for analysis, and send parts of each onward to a dozen other labs in the United States and Europe. As spring turned to summer, we waited for the frozen soil to arrive.

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