Some innovative, many spit-balled, and most quickly abandoned

September 11, 2024 12:16 PM

In recent years, the Arctic has become a magnet for climate change anxiety, with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for signs of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation. It wasn’t always that way. At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, as the fear of nuclear Armageddon hung over American and Soviet citizens, idealistic scientists and engineers saw the vast Arctic region as a place of unlimited potential for creating a bold new future. Greenland emerged as the most tantalizing proving ground for their research. from The Golden Age of Offbeat Arctic Research [Undark]
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

This is really cool to read! thanks...

My late uncle was in the US Air Force and was both a weather scientist and a rocket specialist (I had to confirm that he was BOTH at his recent funeral in Arlington) and I understand he spent a lot of the 60's in Greenland doing "weather research" - part of it became how we model and predict weather in the northern hemisphere, I'm sure part of it was far more clandestine as the military tend to have multiple concurrent strategies. wink wink
posted by djseafood at 12:59 PM on September 11 [4 favorites]

cool :) there's another vehicle focused on in an article i read recently [guardian] exploring what's underneath all that ice (which we may be seeing more of soon...) a submersible: Nereid Under Ice [whoi]
posted by HearHere at 1:17 PM on September 11 [3 favorites]

Thank you for this. It's very much my jam.
posted by tofu_crouton at 3:35 PM on September 11 [1 favorite]

Hmmm, well -- Iʻve been idly wondering for awhile now -- at what date will Lawrence Oatesʻs frozen corpse have made its way to the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf?
posted by Droll Lord at 4:49 PM on September 11 [2 favorites]