The Cold War Ice Core of Greenland

Outside/In

NHPR

Society & Culture, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Nature, Science

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the late 1950s, engineer Herb Ueda Sr. traveled to a remote Arctic military base. His mission? To drill through nearly a mile of ice, and extract the world’s first complete ice core. To finish the job, he and his team would endure sub-zero weather, toxic chemicals, and life inside a military base… which was slowly being crushed by the glacier from which it was carved. In this episode (first released in 2023) Daniel Ackerman takes us inside Camp Century, and explains how a foundational moment in climate science was inextricably linked with the United State's military interest in Greenland. Featuring Curt La Bombard, Julie Brigham-Grette, Herb Ueda Jr., Don Garfield, and Aleqa Hammond. Produced by Daniel Ackerman. For a full list of credits and transcript, go to outsidinradio.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgy.
0:02.5	Now, if you had told me even three years ago that the U.S. would be threatening to invade Greenland,
0:08.2	I think you were kind of kooky.
0:10.7	But here we are.
0:12.3	President Trump has his eye on the world's largest island, so much so that he sent his vice president there to give a speech, albeit on a U.S. military base.
0:21.3	How we doing?
0:22.9	It's cold as shit here.
0:24.5	Nobody's talking.
0:26.2	Trump says he wants Greenland for national security reasons, and because of its wealth of resources.
0:31.8	Oil, natural gas, and rare earth minerals, all buried under the ice.
0:37.1	But if you know your history, you know that this
0:40.2	isn't the first time that the U.S. has been interested in these things. A few years ago,
0:50.9	producer Daniel Ackerman brought us a story that I have been thinking of a lot
0:54.8	lately. It's about a tube of frozen water that helped unlock the planet's hidden climate history.
1:02.1	But it's also about security, the Cold War, and Greenland as a sometimes unwilling participant in
1:10.4	global geopolitics.
1:12.0	So we've brushed the snow off this one, and let me tell you, it is really a wild story.
1:18.7	Stay tuned. All right, let's start with the tape.
1:45.0	On the top of the world, below the surface of a giant ice cap, a city is buried.
1:52.7	This isn't from James Bond or the Marvel comic universe.
1:56.3	This is a documentary made in the 1960s by the U.S. Department of Defense.
2:00.3	The United States Army has established an unprecedented nuclear-powered Arctic research center.
	...

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