Opinion: Confronting Mpox and Vaccine Inequity
Top: At the U.S. Army’s Camp Century on the Greenland ice sheet, an Army truck equipped with a railroad wheel conversion rides on 1,300 feet of track under the snow. Visual: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University
I n recent years, the Arctic has become a magnet for climate change anxiety, with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for signs of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation. It wasn’t always that way.
WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, author and geoscientist Paul Bierman shares a story that didn’t make it into his recent book, “When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future” (W.W. Norton & Company).
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, as the fear of nuclear Armageddon hung over American and Soviet citizens, idealistic scientists and engineers saw the vast Arctic region as a place of unlimited potential for creating a bold new future. Greenland emerged as the most tantalizing proving ground for their research.
