… Life—and a New Warning About the Future
"ANDREW CHRIST REMEMBERS THE DAY he became part of "this 60-year, weird, wild Cold War story." It was 2019, and the University of Vermont researcher was just four days away from defending his dissertation. He was beyond stressed, and had better things to do than help examine an ice core sample drilled decades earlier.
The core was subglacial sediment and rock, taken from below a mile of ice in 1966 at Camp Century, an American research base in Greenland that had served as cover for a secret—and failed—military project. Since being pulled from beneath the ice sheet, the sample had been separated from the rest of the core, had criss-crossed the Atlantic, was lost, and then rediscovered. But it had never been analyzed.
"Miraculously, it had stayed frozen all that time," says Christ. "The first thing we did was melt it." Christ and other geology department colleagues were sorting through sediment from the core sample, washing it off before the next stage of analysis, when he noted peculiar black specks floating in the water. He collected a few and put them under the microscope for a better look. "Oh my god, these are plants," he remembers exclaiming. "I went full-on mad scientist."…"
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