This IGY Bulletin article is based on material supplied by Henri Bader of the U.S. Army Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE).
The major IGY effort in glaciology was directed towards the study of ice and snow in the polar regions, particularly the glaciers and ice sheets, not only to study ice behavior, but to yield data on climate.
As the Bulletin article points out, summer melt on the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is minimal, so annual layers of snow are preserved under later layers, and gradually compressed to ice. Extracting annual layers from pits can allow the determination of a chronology of ice layers, which then allows a time series of data on precipitation, contents of trapped atmospheric gases, volcanic ash, etc., within the ice pores. The first such pit was dug to a depth of 15 meters at Eismitte in the middle of the Greenland ice cap by Ernst Sorge in 1930. This was part of the last expedition of Alfred Wegener, who died during that venture. Wegener was trained as an astronomer, worked as a meteorologist and polar scientist, and formulated the first cogent hypothesis of continental drift.
SIPRE drilled through the Greenland ice sheet to a depth of 300 meters in 1956, and to 411 meters in 1957. By the mid-1960s, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (see below) had further cored to a depth of almost 1400 meters, dating back to about 100,000 years ago.
Equipment for deep core drilling was also delivered to Byrd station in Antarctica in October, 1957.
A more complete history of ice core drilling done before, during, and after the IGY is given in the 47-page document, The History of Early Polar Ice Cores, written by Chester C. Langway, Jr. for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2008.
A prehistoric record of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could be inferred by analyzing gas from pores in the dated ice layers of these cores. These data were critical for developing our current ideas about climate change, including anthropogenic influences.
That publication includes the following entry on the International Geophysical Year, focusing on Henri Bader who was responsible for the Bulletin article:
Henri Bader – the Swiss scientist who helped form SIPRE in 1949 – was a renowned expert on mining and snow, having co-written Snow and Its Metamorphosis, which argued that snow and ice contain geological secrets similar to rock. After the formation of SIPRE, Bader began open pit experiments in Greenland measuring ice strata using Sorge’s Law of Densification, which he had reduced to a mathematical formula.
In 1956, he and assistants Chester “Chet” C. Langway and B. Lyle Hansen continued experiments with ice drilling in Greenland, achieving 991- then 1,336-foot samples.
At the 1957 International Geophysical Year conference, Bader as a member of the National Academy of Sciences proposed extracting a deep ice core in Antarctica with a pilot project in Greenland. Due to the heat and friction caused by heavy oil drills damaging the ice cores, the CRREL team had to develop a thermal drill cooled with a trichloroethylene-based fluid and a vacuum that removed meltwater. Using National Science Foundation (NSF) funding, the team started drilling at Camp Century, Greenland, in 1961, reached bedrock in 1966, and reached bedrock drilling at Byrd Station, Antarctica, in 1968.
The International Polar "Year" of 2007-2009 was actually the Fourth IPY, following the First International Polar Year (1882–1883), the Second International Polar Year (1932–1933), and the IGY (1957–58) which was also the Third IPY. A number of stamps were issued for the Fourth IPY; I bought two joint postal portfolios of stamps issued by the countries of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the USA to honor the IPY. Below is a scan of the booklet cover, and the stamps from Greenland, including one showing ice coring. Jay Smith & Associates calls the souvenir sheets issued by these eight countries joint issues; in my last post I had suggested the missed opportunity during the IGY for a joint stamp issue.
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| Greenland stamp showing ice coring, Scott catalog #491 (2007), for the Fourth IPY |
I don't think I ever knew that there was an underlying zany Cold War endeavor for which the important scientific work at Camp Century was partly a smokescreen. Camp Century was also an underground military base with its own nuclear reactor. Wired magazine puts it as follows:
long after Camp Century had been abandoned, it would come to light that the US military was proposing something called the Iceworm system: a nuclear arsenal of 600 ballistic missiles, trained toward the Soviet Union, which would be in constant motion by rail under the Greenland ice sheet. Iceworm was never built. The military soon understood that Camp Century was doomed. At best it would last 10 years, they acknowledged, at which point the overburden of snow would push down on the roof, compress the walls, and thus destroy it. [Duh, ice flows and deforms, as is known from glaciers.]
Camp Century was a perfect example of Cold War paranoia and eccentricity: an improbable outpost that was expensive to build, difficult to maintain, and unpleasant to live within.
I'd encourage you to read the Wired article, which presents some fascinating details about both projects at Camp Century. Henri Bader is cast in a less glowing light in this writeup. One moral of this story is that you can certainly suspect that whenever the U.S. Army or other service branch is coordinating a "research" program, there are likely some military motivations.
This British Channel 4 video summarizes this military aspect of Camp Century, and its environmental impact:
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