Word: neem
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...firsthand look at such heroism this summer when I joined a team of international researchers led by Dahl-Jensen at the NEEM camp in Greenland. NEEM stands for North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (the acronym is Danish, as are the leaders of the project), and the scientists are digging deep into the Greenland ice--more than a mile and a half deep to be precise--to try to understand its pedigree. Depth is time, and the lower you go, the further back in history you travel. As ice formed in Greenland, year after cold year, bits of atmosphere were trapped...
...NEEM is focused on the Eemian stage, a period from about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, right before the last ice age, when the world was warm--quite warm, about 9°F hotter in Europe than it is today. Given that the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that temperatures could rise 3.24°F to 7.2°F over the coming century, the Eemian could offer a model for the effect such thermometer swings will have on Greenland's ice. A full climatic record of the Eemian has never been constructed, but over the next...
...also be downright freezing, as I discover when our visiting group (a collection of journalists, scientists and Danish environmental officials) decamps from the C-130 Hercules transport plane that brought us to NEEM. It's maybe --9°C (16°F) on the ice--balmy, as far as summertime goes on the Greenland ice sheet. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the motherly Danish field leader of the NEEM project, greets us at the camp's main kitchen, dining room and work space: a toasty geodesic dome straight from the winter dreams of Buckminster Fuller. I quickly learn that a great deal...
...despite the Jimi Hendrix playing on the dome's stereo and the empty mini-kegs of Heineken, this isn't polar summer camp. The scientific work being done at NEEM is as hard as it is necessary. About a mile (1.6 km) outside the main camp, Danish scientists Steffen Bo Hansen and Sigfus Johann Johnsen drill holes 70 meters down. The ice beneath NEEM is more than a mile and a half (2.5 km) thick, the result of over 130,000 years of accumulated snow. Tiny air bubbles from the year the snow fell are trapped in layers of frost...
...billion tons of ice over the past four summers, melting away like the cubes of glacier--dating back to 1816--that the scientists drink in glasses of whiskey at a farewell party. As it warms, we'll probably lose more, but the hope is that through projects like NEEM, we will finally understand our climatic past before meeting our uncertain future. The scientists here think we're running out of time--a concept that loses all meaning through the nightless arctic summer. I force myself to go to bed at about 11:30 and try to sleep despite the light...