Scientists have recently rediscovered a core sample obtained by a covert military operation
in Greenland during the cold war. At the bottom of the core sample they discovered frozen
soil which held plant fragments that appeared to have been flash frozen and turns the idea
that Greenland has been covered in ice for the last 3 million years on its head. Lets
find out more...
In 1959 during the cold war the US Army Corps of Engineers began construction of Camp Century
in north-western Greenland. This was part of an operation called Project Iceworm. It
is thought it was a covert mission to build a subsurface base concealing hundreds of nuclear
warheads, where they would be within striking distance of the Soviet Union. Oddly enough
they then proceeded to take various core samples from deep below the ice. One of the samples
they took measured 3.4 meters in length taken from a depth of over 1.3km below the ice surface.
After the Army terminated Project Iceworm, the core went into storage, initially at the
State University of New York and then later at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
There it would lie waiting in a freezer until it was rediscovered in 2017.
When the scientist started to look at the ice core they discovered something rather
remarkable. Hidden in the core sample were fragments of plants that were flowering plants.
A type that should not exist in these harsh conditions.
Currently Greenland is covered in large ice sheets and these are thought to have existed
here for at least 3 millions years. These tiny fragments would suggest that in fact
Greenland must have been ice free in the much more recent past.
At the base of the ice core they found frozen chunks of sediment about 10cm cubed. They
initially put them in a glass jar and forgot about them. It wasn’t until 2017 during
an inventory of the content of one of the freezers that the curator recognised the long
lost core samples.
When they rinsed the frozen soil to sort it into different size grains, they noticed little
black things floating in the water. When the scientist put these particles under a microscope
they were in for quite a surprise. They could see small twigs and leaves in this frozen
sediment. The only way they could describe what they were seeing was as if they were
freeze=dried. When they pulled them out and put a little water on them, they would unfurl.
They looked as though they had died yesterday!
These plants could grow on Greenland only if the island's ice sheets were almost gone.
The next step in their study is to try and work out exactly how recently this may have
happened.
In order to attempt to date the plants they identified isotopes of Aluminium and Beryllium.
It is thought that these isotopes can be used to determine age. These isotopes are thought
to accumulate through the atmosphere via the exposure to radiation into the exposed minerals.
Once they are buried they would no longer receive these and they would slowly decay.
They determined based on the isotope ratios that these plants could date to between a
few hundred thousand years to about a million years ago.
Interestingly traces of leaf waxes in the core sediment seem to match those of present
day tundra ecosystems suggesting these plants are not far removed from those we find nowadays.
What is interesting in this article is that they focus mainly on the fact that it present
a big headache in terms of the ice sheet covering in Greenland and seems to suggest that the
idea that these have existed for 3 millions years in wrong and that there were at least
2 separate events in the last 1 million years where a large part of Greenland was ice free.
More shocking for me is the state of preservation of the samples themselves. The fact that they
describe it as flash frozen is of particular interest but something that do not speculate
on. They describe them as fossils only because they think they are so old. In fact there
is nothing fossilised about them. Something caused the leaves and twigs to be flash frozen
preserving them. The fact that they could rehydrate them and they uncurled is absolutely
stunning.
Now this flash freezing is something we have talked about as part of the Earth in Upheaval
series. We find Mammoth carcasses perfectly preserved in both Alaska and Siberia. These
by their dating are from very different events but as we saw they have discovered plants
and seeds in Siberia which seem to indicate that areas here too were not covered in ice
and appeared to be a much more temperate climate with a large ecosystem of plants. So why would
this also not be the case for Greenland? Are these events in any way connected? If we look
at their dating method then it should be immediately obvious that there are a number of problems
with dating with isotopes. Firstly we really don’t know the isotope ratio in the past.
We can only extrapolate on what we think might happen. We also know that the half life of
radioactive elements does not remain constant but can be affected by external facts to speed
it up. Thinking about it in terms of the SAM model may make this a little more obvious
as we just need to stimulate the instability to initiate the ejection of an alpha or beta
particle to cause the atom to seek a more stable state. If all these events are connected
by huge electrical storms then this could indeed cause this to occur much quicker.
I find it odd that the question of how these plants became flash frozen was not even a
consideration. This clearly shows this is no gradual change from one climate to another.
Something very dramatic happened to flash freeze these plants and dehydrate them in
an instant. What is also interesting is that these are all small fragments requiring a
microscope to see the detail. No large fragments were present. Now they obviously only have
one ice core to look at so it might just be chance. There is also soil surrounding the
plant material suggesting some sort of eco system.
But it reminds me of the chaotic remains found in Alaska and the broken trees in Siberia
so I suppose one possibility that they seem not to have considered was that these samples
did not originate from here but were transported there? But we still need to consider that
they were found 1.3km below the ice surface.
One other glaring question is what exactly were the Army doing there back in 1960? It
is thought that Project Iceworm was a top secret program with the aim of building a
network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. This part of
the mission was kept secret from the Government of Denmark. Instead a highly publicised cover
project known as Camp Century was launched in 1960. Its mission was to test the feasibility
of construction techniques under ice. It’s grand plan was to have a system of tunnels
over 4000km in length.
Within 3 years after it’s excavation ice core samples taken by geologists working at
Camp Century demonstrated that the glacier was moving much faster than anticipated and
would destroy the tunnels and planned launch stations in about 2 years. In 1965 the site
was evacuated and finally in 1966 the camp was closed down.
Why was there only 1 core left in the freezer? Did they really only drill one core? Or are
there more cores lying somewhere else with more clues as to what might have happened?
Is this why they were drilling here to uncover what might have happened in our recent past?
This article asks many more questions than it answers but I see clear connections to
many things...