In today’s newsletter, as the potentially devastating Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida’s west coast, a new feature explores signs of climate distress coming from Greenland. And then:
Climate scientists are watching walls of ice flatten and disappear. One compared visiting a melting glacier to calling on a friend with a terminal illness. “You have to have the strength to say goodbye,” he said.Photographs by Ragnar Axelsson for The New Yorker
Elizabeth Kolbert
Staff writer
Project Iceworm, a scheme hatched by the United States Army in the late nineteen-fifties, lent new meaning to the phrase “fighting a cold war.” The plan called for boring thousands of miles of tunnels into the Greenland ice sheet. These would then be used to shuttle around nuclear missiles in a great, subglacial game of cat and mouse.
Iceworm was, of course, secret. But the missile project, which never proceeded beyond the planning stage, had a public component that actually got built in Greenland’s northwest corner: a research station called Camp Century. The station boasted a mess hall, barracks, a library, a post office, and a hobby shop, all encased in the ice.
Though Camp Century was mostly a front, real research was conducted there. In the mid-sixties, a team of scientists succeeded in drilling all the way through the ice sheet, about forty-five hundred feet deep. The drillers pulled up hundreds of cylinders of ice, which turned out to contain a wealth of information about the climate and helped make ice drilling a scientific subfield. Pursuant to this, in the late eighties, the U.S. National Science Foundation established a research station at the very center of Greenland, where the ice sheet is nearly two miles thick. Scientists there eventually managed to drill down more than ten thousand feet.
For my piece in this week’s issue, I travelled to the N.S.F. station. It is now called Summit, and, though it sits on, rather than under, the ice, the station is still a marvel of engineering. The top of the Greenland ice sheet is one of the most remarkable places a person can visit without leaving planet Earth—a frigid, featureless expanse of pure white. I went to Summit because, even at its very highest point, where temperatures remain the coldest, the Greenland ice sheet is now experiencing melt. Is this a climatological warning sign, or something even more ominous?
Further reading: Kolbert has visited Greenland’s ice sheet before. “I keep finding myself drawn back to the ice—to its beauty, to its otherworldliness, to its sheer, ungodly significance,” she writes in a piece, from 2016, about life on a shrinking landmass.
Open Questions
Should You Just Give Up?
Illustration by Josie Norton
Sure, striving feels good—but have you tried giving up? Putting the load down? Embracing imperfectionism? Joshua Rothman looks at two books that explore how letting go might be the way to go, one by a psychoanalyst and the other by a journalist turned self-help author. Both writers suggest that there is much to be gained when you give up. Read the column »
Open Questions publishes every Tuesday.
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Cartoon by Mick Stevens
More Fun & Games
P.S. The Great Chicago Fire began on this day in 1871. Last year, Margaret Talbot investigated how the fire—which burned for many hours, killed an estimated three hundred people, and left thousands unhoused—got started. It turns out that there are some uncomfortable truths to be found in the ashes. The disaster is “a rich case study not only in urban history and the sociology of catastrophe,” Talbot writes, “but in how people choose to remember their collective past.”
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.
