Cold War-era research station Camp Century samples are revealing new insights about climate change today.

It appears like one thing out of science fiction: Within the late Nineteen Fifties, the US Military carved a tiny “metropolis” into the Greenland ice sheet, 800 miles from the North Pole. It had residing services, and scientific labs, and dealing showers, all powered by one small nuclear reactor.The analysis base was known as “Camp Century,” a Chilly Conflict scientific undertaking that helped researchers deepen their understanding of ice. As a part of their efforts, they wound up drilling near a mile down via the ice sheet to drag up an ice core: a sequence of lengthy cylinders of ice that function a report of Earth’s historical past, with the whole lot from atmospheric gases to volcanic fallout preserved of their tightly packed layers.The ice from Camp Century has been totally sampled and studied because it first got here out of the ice sheet. It, together with the ice from many different ice cores, has taught us quite a bit about Earth’s local weather going again tens of hundreds of years — about how abruptly local weather can change and the function that greenhouse gases play in warming.However the drillers at Camp Century introduced up extra than simply ice. In addition they introduced up a number of toes of sediment from beneath it. Besides, as a geoscientist named Paul Bierman, who wrote an entire ebook in regards to the ice and sediment from Camp Century, explains, these samples went largely understudied for many years, with only a handful of papers written about them.“ I feel the main focus of the group was nearly laser on the ice and never on the stuff beneath it,” he says.These sediments from beneath the ice have been so undervalued, in actual fact, that they disappeared into some freezers in Denmark for years. Till, in 2017, some researchers discovered them once more. And when scientists lastly began to check these sediments in earnest, they found a bonanza of former lifeforms and a trove of knowledge.On the newest episode of Vox’s Unexplainable podcast, we discover these long-ignored sediments, and study what they will train us about our local weather previous — and future.