Word: drills
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...white, blinding and endless. At NEEM we're 77 degrees latitude north of the equator and nearly 2,500 meters above sea level, all of it accumulated snow and ice - some 130,000 years worth, which is what the scientists at NEEM eventually hope to drill through. The polar horizon stretches to all sides without landmarks, save for the black and red flags that mark the boundaries of the camp, the red sleeping tents and the heated main dome, a geodesic wooden structure that is the kitchen, conference center and overall heart of NEEM. The result is scary, when...
...there's no shortage of work to be done. A kilometer and a half outside the main camp, Sigfus Johann Johnsen and Steffen Bo Hansen drill for shallow ice cores. This is a side project, a much smaller drill that can bore down 70 m or so below the surface, which covers the past few hundred years of climatic history. At this depth what they bring back is not solid ice, but a half-snow, half-ice substance called firn. It's solid but porous, so it can trap some of the gas present in the atmosphere when it accumulated...
...make sure the ice stays stable - though we're far above the Arctic Circle, with the open sun the temperature is only -6 degrees or -7 degrees C, though the wind can make it feel worse on the open snow. The sprawling cold room is also where the main drilling at NEEM will be done. That won't take place until next summer, but the scientists have already dug out a deep trench where the main drill will bore to the bottom of the ice. Here the cores will be pure ice, inside which gas will be trapped in tiny...
...best ways to try to figure out what will happen in the future is to ascertain what happened in the past. That's why we're in Greenland. Our team will be visiting the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, an international research team that has staked out a corner of the island's ice sheet and will, as the name suggests, drill. The ice in central Greenland is nearly 3 km thick, and as you drill down to the bottom, you can read the climatic history of the island as if you were counting tree rings going back...
Producer David Wolper does not believe in small gestures, especially when large expensive ones will do. For next month's four-day extravaganza celebrating the refurbished Statue of Liberty, Wolper has lined up 850 drill- team members, 300 tap dancers, 200 Elvis Presley impersonators, 150 banjo players, two aircraft carriers and one President of the United States. To help pay the spectacle's $30 million bill, Wolper offered the TV rights to the networks. ABC bid $10 million, beating out NBC, the only other network that took part in the auction. ABC's competitors did not mind losing the mock...