Glaciology was still in its infancy around the time of the Second World War, but the shift of military-strategic interests towards the Arctic as a potential battlefield of the Cold War led to an extensive build-up of research activities in this field. In 1949 the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) was founded under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct basic and applied research in glaciology and permafrost science. SIPRE’s research activities in Greenland were primarily located around the Thule Air Base and at stations on the ice cap. Primary focus of these studies was the physics and dynamics of the ice; ice as a building material, how to build runways on land- and sea-ice and construction and maintenance of military installations scale: from traverses across the ice cap for mapping of snow accumulation and flow, to laboratory studies of crystal formation and plastic deformation of ice. Concurrently several European expeditions went to Greenland: The French EPF (Expédition Polaires Françaises) from 1948-53 and the French,German, Austrian, Swiss and Danish collaborative EGIG (Expédition Glaciologique Internationale au Groenlande), which traversed the ice sheet during the International Geophysical Year measuring the accumulation and flow of ice and drilling short ice cores for physical and chemical analysis.
Environmental information in the ice such as nuclear fallout, volcanic dust and from the 1960’s the temperature record which can be reconstructed many thousand years back in time through isotope analysis of the annual snow layers, was another focus point. This information was extracted from ice cores drilled both by EGIG and SIPRE, and in 1966, SIPRE’s successor institution CRREL (the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory) succeeded in the first penetration of the ice sheet at the military Camp Century in northern Greenland. In the 1970’s ice core studies took over as the primary field of glaciological research in Greenland when an American-Danish-Swiss collaboration drilled through the ice sheet to gain knowledge on past climate changes.
Historical work on basic glaciological research in the 20th century is almost non-existent and only recently has ice core research become a subject of historical analysis (Lolck, 2006; Elzinga 2007). Yet this field offers interesting perspectives for the historian. Research institutions like SIPRE and CRREL were established in response to military needs, but to what extent were individual research projects at these institutions shaped by specific military interests? Did scientist seize the opportunity to further their own research interest? European glaciology was guided more by national and geographical interests and was spearheaded by France which was present in both Polar Regions and Switzerland which had a strong tradition in glaciology, while Denmark took part mainly as host country. How did the European glaciological expeditions in Greenland compare to the American research in terms of means, methods and aims? To what extent did European and American scientists collaborate and compete on glaciological research? Denmark became a more active player in Greenland glaciology as ice core research entered the stage in the IGY, and Danish started collaborating with French and American researchers on ice core analysis. How did the Danish sovereignty influence these collaborative efforts?
Activities at CRREL peaked in the mid-60’s, with the establishment of Camp Century, a camp dug into the ice sheet, housing 200 men and supplied with energy from a portable nuclear reactor. In the late 1960’s the U.S. military gave up plans to establish a wider network of tunnels under the ice to hide nuclear missiles, the so-called project Iceworm, for political and practical reasons (Petersen 2008). As a result glaciological research at CRREL waned. Instead growing environmental concerns motivated support for an international ice-drilling and -analysis project to reconstruct past climate. How did this shift manifest itself in funding and publication patterns and the institutions involved?
Finally, an analysis of the scientific results of the glaciological studies in Greenland and their communication to a wider public can shed light on how the ice cap changed in the scientific as well as the public perception from an robust medium for engineering and military operations to a vulnerable element of the Earth system witnessing climate changes of the past.
