When I visited Cambridge, work on the gondola was under way, and Keith offered to show me the setup. We headed down a maze of halls, into a lab crammed with pipes, gas canisters, packing crates, circuit boards, and a Home Depot’s worth of tools. “This is the flight frame,” he said, pointing to a shed-sized arrangement of metal beams. “And those are the flight propellers.”
Keith explained that the experiment would unfold in stages. First, the unmanned balloon would drift through the stratosphere, releasing a stream of particles from the gondola. Then the balloon would reverse direction and sail back through the plume of particles, so that their behavior could be monitored.
The goal of the experiment is not to test geoengineering per se—a couple of pounds of calcium carbonate or sulfur dioxide is nowhere near enough to make an observable difference to the climate. Nonetheless, SCoPEx would represent the first rigorous field test—or, if you prefer, sky test—of the concept, and there’s been a lot of opposition to letting it get off the ground.
“Even if the amount is inconsequential,” Keutsch had told me, “it’s extremely symbolic to have a balloon in the stratosphere spraying out particles.”
“There are people who think that we shouldn’t do this experiment for reasons I think are coherent,” Keith told me, as we watched one of his graduate students applying epoxy to the landing gear of the SCoPEx gondola. “But the actual physical risk, just to be clear, is that something falls apart and falls on somebody’s head.”
So far, Harvard’s geoengineering research program is the world’s best-financed, with funding of almost $20 million. But there are several other research groups in the United States and Europe exploring alternative forms of “climate intervention.”
Sir David King, a chemist who served as the chief scientific adviser to British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and as the government’s special representative for climate change, recently launched a research initiative, the Centre for Climate Repair, at Cambridge University.
“We’re now at about 1.1, 1.2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” King told me over the phone one day. “And the conclusion is that this is already too much. The Arctic sea ice, for example, has been melting far more rapidly than was predicted. We’re seeing the Greenland ice sheet beginning to melt more quickly than was predicted. So how do we cope with this?”
King said that in addition to deep emissions reductions—“without that, frankly, we’re cooked”—the center was created to promote research into carbon removal and technologies to “refreeze” the poles. One idea he mentioned was an Arctic version of cloud-brightening. According to this scheme, a fleet of ships would be dispatched to the Arctic Ocean to shoot very fine droplets of salt water into the sky. The salt crystals, it’s theorized, would increase the clouds’ reflectivity, thus reducing the amount of sunlight striking the ice.
“The hope is to preserve the layer of sea ice that is formed during the polar winter,” King said. “And if you proceed with that year on year, you rebuild the ice, layer by layer.”
* * *
—
Dan Schrag is the director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment and a MacArthur “genius” grant winner. He helped set up Harvard’s geoengineering program and sits on its advisory board.
“Some have expressed consternation at the prospect of engineering the climate for the entire planet,” he has written. “Ironically, such engineering efforts may be the best chance for survival for most of the earth’s natural ecosystems—although perhaps they should no longer be called natural if such engineering systems are ever deployed.”
Schrag’s office is about a block away from Keith’s and Keutsch’s, and while I was visiting Cambridge, I arranged to meet with him there. His dog, Mickey, a genial Chinook, padded over to greet me.
“I don’t know if you ever feel pressure like this as a writer,” Schrag said. “But I see a lot of pressure from my colleagues to have a happy ending. People want hope. And I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m a scientist. My job is not to tell people the good news. My job is to describe the world as accurately as possible.’
“As a geologist, I think about timescales,” he went on. “The timescale of the climate system is centuries to tens of thousands of years. If we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which, of course, is impossible, it’s still going to warm at least for centuries, because the ocean hasn’t equilibrated. That’s just basic physics. We’re not sure how much additional warming that is, but it could easily be another seventy percent beyond what we’ve experienced. So in that sense, we’re already at 2°C. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4°C. That’s not optimistic or pessimistic. I think that’s objective reality.” (A 4°C global temperature increase—7.2° F—is not just well beyond the official threshold of disaster, it’s heading into territory that’s probably best described as unthinkable.)
“The idea that somehow research on solar geoengineering is going to open Pandora’s box, I think that’s just unbelievably naïve,” Schrag said. “Do you really believe that the U.S. military or the Chinese military haven’t thought about this? Come on! They’ve done cloud-seeding for rain. This is not a new idea, and it’s not a secret.
“People have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not, whether they think it should be done or not. They have to understand that we don’t get to decide. The United States doesn’t get to decide. You’re a world leader and there’s a technology that could take the pain and suffering away, or take some of it away. You’ve got to be really tempted. I’m not saying they’ll do it tomorrow. I feel like we might have thirty years. The highest priority for scientists is to figure out all the different ways this could go wrong.”
While we were talking, a friend of Schrag’s showed up at his office. Schrag introduced her as Allison Macfarlane, a professor at George Washington University and a former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. When he told her we were discussing geoengineering, she made a thumbs-down gesture.
“It’s the unintended consequences,” she said. “You think you’re doing the right thing. From what you know of the natural world, it should work. But then you do it and it completely backfires and something else happens.”
“The real world of climate change is that we’re up against it,” Schrag responded. “Geoengineering is not something to do lightly. The reason we’re thinking about it is because the real world has dealt us a shitty hand.”
“We dealt it ourselves,” Macfarlane said.
3
Right around the time the U.S. Navy launched Project Stormfury, the Army embarked on a project that was known—though only to a few, since it was top secret—as Iceworm. Project Iceworm was an exceptionally cold plan to win the Cold War. The Army proposed boring hundreds of miles of tunnels into Greenland’s ice sheet. These would be outfitted with rail lines, and nuclear missiles would be shuttled along the tracks to keep the Soviets guessing. “Iceworm thus couples mobility with dispersion, concealment, and hardness,” a classified report boasted.
Pursuant to this plan, in the summer of 1959 the Army Corps of Engineers was dispatched to build a base. Situated at seventy-seven degrees north latitude, about a hundred and fifty miles east of Baffin Bay, Camp Century was by far the biggest thing ever erected on—or within—the ice sheet. Using what were essentially giant snowblowers, the Corps dug a network of subsurface passages, which connected dorms, a mess hall, a chapel, a movie theater, and a barbershop. There was even a subglacial dispensary that sold perfume to send back home. (A favorite camp joke was there was a girl behind every tree.) Powering the enterprise was a portable nuclear reactor.
Camp Century was the one part of Project Iceworm the Army advertised. The base, it maintained, had been built to conduct polar research, and the Army produced a promotional film chronicling the herculean effort made by the Corps. Getting construction m
aterials in from the coast required convoys of special tractors that labored across the ice at two miles an hour. “Camp Century is a symbol of man’s unceasing struggle to conquer his environment,” the narrator of the film intoned. Reporters were taken on tours through the tunnels, and two Boy Scouts—one American, one Danish—were invited north for a stay.
No sooner had construction been completed, though, than Camp Century’s troubles began. Ice, like water, flows. The Corps knew this and had built the dynamic into its calculations. But the Corps hadn’t adequately factored in the human factor—the way heat from the reactor would speed up the process. Almost at once, the tunnels started to contract. To keep the dorms, the movie theater, and the mess hall from being crushed, crews had to continually “trim” the ice with chainsaws. One visitor to the base compared the racket to the annual general meeting of all the devils of hell. By 1964, the chamber housing the reactor had deformed so much, the unit had to be removed. In 1967, the whole base was abandoned.
One way to gloss the Camp Century story is as another Anthropocene allegory. Man sets out to “conquer his environment.” He congratulates himself for his resourcefulness and derring-do, only to find the walls closing in. Drive out nature with a snowblower, yet she will always hurry back.
But that’s not the reason I’m telling it. Or at least not the main reason.
Camp Century may have been a Potemkin research station; still, actual research was conducted there. Even as the tunnels warped and buckled, a team of glaciologists set about drilling straight down through the ice sheet. The drilling team pulled up long, skinny cylinders of ice and kept going until they hit bedrock. The cylinders—more than a thousand in all—constituted the first complete Greenland ice core. What it revealed about the history of the climate was so puzzling and unlikely that scientists are still trying to make sense of it.
* * *
—
I first read about Camp Century when I was planning a trip of my own to Greenland. I had arranged to visit a Danish-led drilling operation called the North Greenland Ice Core Project, or North GRIP for short. The operation was situated on top of two miles of ice, in a spot even more remote than Camp Century. To get there, I hitched a ride on a ski-equipped C-130 Hercules, which those in the know call a Herc. The flight was carrying several thousand feet of drilling cable, a team of European glaciologists, and Denmark’s minister of research. (Greenland is a Danish territory, a fact the U.S. Army cheerfully ignored in planning for Iceworm.) Like the rest of us, the minister had to sit in the Herc’s hold, wearing military-issue earplugs.
One of North GRIP’s directors, J. P. Steffensen, greeted us when we disembarked. We were dressed in huge insulated boots and heavy snow gear. Steffensen had on a pair of old sneakers, a filthy parka that was flapping open, and no gloves. Tiny icicles hung from his beard. First he delivered a short lecture on the dangers of dehydration. “It sounds like a complete contradiction in terms,” he told us. “You’re standing on three thousand meters of water. But it’s extremely dry. So make sure you have to go and pee.” Then he briefed us on camp protocol. There were two frost-proof toilets from Sweden, but men were kindly requested to relieve themselves out on the ice, at a spot designated by a little red flag.
One of the entrances to Camp Century
North GRIP was a decidedly modest affair. It consisted of a half dozen cherry-red tents arrayed around a geodesic dome that had been purchased, mail order, from Minnesota. In front of the dome, someone had planted the standard jokey symbol of isolation—a milepost showing the nearest town, Kangerlussuaq, to be five hundred miles away. Nearby stood the standard jokey symbol of the cold—a plywood palm tree. The view in all directions was exactly the same: an utterly flat expanse of white that could be described as bleak or, alternatively, as sublime.
Camp Century’s tunnels had to be maintained with chainsaws.
Beneath the camp, an eighty-foot-long tunnel led down to the drilling room. This chamber had been hollowed out of the ice, like the passageways at Camp Century, and inside it, the temperature, even in June, never rose above freezing. Again as at Camp Century, the chamber was shrinking. Pine beams had been installed to reinforce the ceiling, but they’d already shattered under the weight of the snow. Drilling began every morning at 8 a.m. The first task of the day was to lower the drill, a twelve-foot-long tube with fierce metal teeth on one end, down to the bottom of the borehole. Once in position, the toothy tube was set spinning, so that an ice cylinder gradually formed within it. The cylinder was then pulled up by means of a steel cable. The first time I watched the process, a glaciologist from Iceland and another from Germany were manning the controls. At the depth they had reached—nine thousand six hundred and eighty feet—it took an hour just for the drill to descend. During that time, there wasn’t much for the pair to do except watch their computers, which sat on little heating pads, and listen to ABBA. “The word ‘stuck’ is not in our vocabulary,” the Icelander told me, with a nervous laugh.
Like all glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet is made up entirely of accumulated snow. The most recent layers are thick and airy, while the older layers are thin and dense, which means that to drill down through the ice is to descend backward in time, at first gradually and then much more rapidly. About a hundred and forty feet down, there’s snow dating from the American Civil War; some twenty-five hundred feet down, snow from the time of Plato; and at a depth of five thousand three hundred and fifty feet, snow from when prehistoric painters were decorating the caves at Lascaux. As the snow is compressed, its crystal structure changes to ice. But in most other respects, it remains unchanged, a relic of the moment it formed. In the Greenland ice, there’s volcanic ash from Tambora, lead pollution from Roman smelters, and dust blown in from Mongolia on ice age winds. Every layer contains tiny bubbles of trapped air, each a sample of a past atmosphere. To someone who knows how to read them, the layers are an archive of the sky.
Eventually, the drill team pulled up a short section of core—about two feet long and four inches in diameter. Someone went to fetch the minister, who arrived in the chamber wearing a red snowsuit. The section looked a lot like a two-foot-long cylinder of ordinary ice. But, one of the drillers explained, it was made up of snow that had fallen over a hundred and five thousand years ago, at the beginning of the last ice age. The minister exclaimed something in Danish and seemed suitably impressed.
* * *
—
The first person to realize just how much information could be gleaned from an ice core was a geophysicist named Willi Dansgaard. Dansgaard, who was also Danish, was an expert on the chemistry of precipitation. Presented with a sample of rainwater, he could, based on its isotopic composition, determine the temperature at which it had formed. This method, he realized, could also be applied to snow. When Dansgaard heard about the Camp Century core, in 1966, he applied for permission to analyze it. He was more than a little surprised when it was granted. The Americans, he later wrote, didn’t seem to realize what a “gold mine” of data they had in their refrigerated vault.
In its broad outlines, Dansgaard’s reading of the Camp Century core confirmed what was already known about climate history. The most recent ice age, known in the United States as the Wisconsin, began roughly a hundred and ten thousand years ago. During the Wisconsin, ice sheets spread over the northern hemisphere until they covered Scandinavia, Canada, New England, and much of the upper Midwest. Throughout this period, Greenland was frigid. When the Wisconsin ended, roughly ten thousand years ago, Greenland (and the rest of the world) warmed.
The details were a different matter. Dansgaard’s analysis of the core suggested that in the midst of the last ice age, the climate of Greenland was so variable it could hardly be called a climate. Average temperatures on the ice sheet had, it appeared, shot up by as much as 8°C—more than 14°F—in fifty years. Then they had dropped again, almost as abruptly. This had happened not just o
nce but many times. A temperature swing of 14°F? It was as if New York City had suddenly become Houston, or Houston had become Riyadh, and then flipped back again. Everyone, including Dansgaard, was perplexed. Could these violent swings in the data correspond to real events? Or did they represent some kind of glitch?
Over the next four decades, five more cores were extracted from different parts of the ice sheet. Each time, the wild swings showed up. Meanwhile, other climate records, including pollen deposits from a lake in Italy, ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea, and stalagmites from a cave in China, revealed the same pattern. The temperature swings became known, after Dansgaard and a Swiss colleague, Hans Oeschger, as Dansgaard–Oeschger events. There are twenty-five such D–O events recorded in the Greenland ice. Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State, has compared the effect to watching “a three-year-old who has just discovered a light switch, flicking it back and forth.”
The last great swing took place as the ice age was ending, and it was a doozy. Temperatures in Greenland shot up by 15°F in a decade, or perhaps even faster. Then things settled into a new and very different regime. For the next ten thousand years, temperatures in Greenland (and the rest of the world) remained more or less constant, decade after decade, century after century.
All of civilization falls within this period of relative tranquility, and so this sort of calm is what we take to be the norm. It’s an understandable mistake, but still a mistake. Over the last hundred and ten thousand years, the only period as stable as our own is our own.
Under a White Sky Page 16