The Ice at the End of the World by Jon Gertner;

Author:Jon Gertner;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

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It was anyone’s guess what the drillers would find at the bottom of the ice sheet. In 1962, Henri Bader had laid out a few thoughts about the glacier bed. The drillers might encounter solid rock or till—that is, small stones and dirt produced by the powerful grinding movement of the ice sheet as it moved over the bedrock—or a pocket of natural gas. Bader also noted that a Russian glaciologist, Igor Alekseyevich Zotikov, had developed a bizarre hypothesis that “heat flux” from the earth’s interior would produce at the glacier bed “stores of energy” from compressed air—so much energy, in fact, that it could “turn the giant turbines of a great electric power station for many thousands of years.”12 Whatever the result, it was clear the drillers were on the verge of tapping into a place on earth that had not been disturbed for tens of thousands of years.

The team returned to Trench 12 and started up the electrodrill in the late spring of 1966. Their coring work was still the same: cut, grip, sever; pull the core up for capture and analysis; repeat. On July 4, 1966, they hit bedrock at 4,450 feet. There was no gush of gas or explosion of air. A photo exists from the day that Ueda reached bottom: Wearing army fatigues and an insulated hat, he stands beside a long cylinder of ice and rock that has been slid from a drilling sleeve onto a trough for observation. He looks fairly amazed and also relieved. Ueda would later recall that it was the most satisfying minute of his career. “You can imagine—it took us how many years?” he says, before concluding the number was six.13 To celebrate the accomplishment, some of the men at Century took a small chip of ice from a core that approximately dated to the birth of Christ and toasted the occasion by putting it in a glass of Drambuie. But Ueda and his fellow drillers weren’t quite finished. Once they extracted the final core of ice, they used the drill to cut into the bedrock and dirt below, pulling up about a hundred feet of it. When they concluded they had about all they could want, they finally packed up.

Camp Century was by now pretty much finished, too. The summer of 1966 marked its final season as an army base. With the nuclear reactor gone, the army’s main concern was bringing the tractors, trucks, and wanigans back to Thule. Herb Ueda and his team took the electrodrill; they had plans to ship it to Antarctica and use it to extract a core at a camp called Byrd Station, beginning that fall.14 But almost everything else was left in the Camp Century trenches: prefabricated huts that served as dorms and mess halls, tables, chairs, sinks, mattresses, bunks, urinals, the billiards table. Waste products from the camp—human sewage, diesel fuel, toxic chemicals such as PCBs, and radioactive coolant from the reactor—were left behind, too.

The working assumption was that everything would soon be crushed by the overburden of snow, anyway.

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