The Universe Within (24 page)

What happened to the planet at the time of this genetic change? Earth got cooler. The forests of Antarctica and the North retreated, to be replaced by ice. Grasses spread to new places around the world. The fruit-bearing palm and fig trees, so common in Wyoming and throughout the warm world, declined, yielding forests mostly of leaves—some tough, some soft, some nutritious, some inedible. The skills that are now so useful to the primates with color vision in Kibale, Uganda, were a key to their success during the period of global
cooling. The cold brought a new flora, one that put a new kind of color vision at a premium.

Paul Tudge discerned tiny stumps in a vast landscape, paleontologists find tiny fossils inside a field of rocks, and our primate ancestors survived climate change by discriminating nutritious foods in a dense collage of leaves in forests. Every time you admire a richly colorful view, you can thank India for slamming into Asia, continents for retreating from Antarctica, and the poles for becoming frozen wastes. Buried within it all lies the way carbon atoms move through our world.

A
s we lumbered along at a ground speed of thirty miles per hour, I felt as if our plane would drop from the sky. With this strong headwind, the five-hundred-mile trip from Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, to our remote landing strip on east
Greenland could take nearly half the day. The craft we were flying, a DeHavilland Twin Otter, is the workhorse of the Arctic. With a stall speed of fifty-five miles per hour and fitted with huge balloon tires or skis, it can land on tiny patches of rocky tundra or
ice nestled in remote Arctic valleys. Hunched in a compartment big enough for only four crew, pilots, and gear, I could only imagine how early Arctic explorers—those who set out in the
nineteenth century with wool coats, leather shoes, and salt pork dinners—felt on their first sight of the North. With the slow ride and a window seat, I was able to linger on the view.

During the trip north, the vista transforms as plants recede and the extent of ice expands. The sea ice appears in patches at first, then forms a solid sheet over the ocean. Seen from ten thousand feet, the ice grades from a clean, almost pure white to shades of blue, green, and teal. With shapes like no other place on Earth, it fractures in cubes in some spots and in long sticks and crystalline diamonds in others.

The slow, low-altitude approach to Greenland is defined by an ominous wall of fog that lingers in the windshield for hours. As one gets closer, the fog is revealed to be a massive sheet of ice that extends as far as the eye can see. The center of the island is filled by one of the largest
glaciers on the planet. The sheet extends six thousand feet high and six miles deep, over an area the size of Texas. Exposures of bed
rock of the island are restricted to cliffs that line the coast; the rest of Greenland’s rock lies buried deep under ice. The ice cap is a lifeless glacial desert touched by humans only rarely.

In one bout of activity, this desert of ice sprang to life in the 1950s, when Greenland took strategic importance during the Cold War. On the northwest corner of the ice cap a secret
project run by the
U.S. Army was launched with a name right out of
Dr. Strangelove:
Project Iceworm.

The plan, concocted somewhere in the seventeen miles of Pentagon hallways, was to carve silos for six hundred nuclear warheads in the ice in northern Greenland. Connecting these silos were to be tunnels that contained an entire underground city given the futuristic name
Camp Century.

The project was started secretly in 1959, when twenty-one tunnels were dug with heavy equipment flown from bases far to the south. In its heyday, this city under the ice housed over two
hundred people and contained a shop, hospital, t
heater, even a church. Power was supplied by the world’s first portable nuclear reactor, the plucky Alco PM-2A. Heat from the reactor melted ice to provide the subglacial city with water. Self-sufficient and mostly belowground, the whole operation was something like a human ant farm.

Being close to perceived threats in the U.S.S.R., Camp Century had the makings of a perfect military base. The plan worked well, except for one problem: ice moves. By 1966, it had become clear that the ice was shifting so extensively that warping tunnels would destroy expensive equipment. Pictures of Camp Century
taken today reveal twisted machinery and abandoned huts, all artifacts of schemes and fears inside an ancient block of ice.

Work at Camp Century did have value, though not of the type Pentagon planners could have ever foreseen.

Louis Agassiz was born in 1807 with charm, intelligence, and an unrelenting passion to study nature. Even as a child, he fed his insatiable curiosity by making his own collections of animals and plants, often drawing each of their organs in exquisite detail. He believed in learning by seeing, a dictum that was to become his catchphrase throughout his career. Sensing his proclivities at an early age, his parents set him up to apprentice with an uncle who had established a successful business. They wanted Louis to develop into a successful “man of affairs,” not a collector of bugs and rocks. But they underestimated the influence of his charm. Young Agassiz would have none of his parents’ designs: he enlisted one of his teachers to lobby his parents for him to stay in school and become, as he said later, “a man of letters.”

While Louis was in his late teens, he and his brother were studying in Zurich and found themselves without a ride home, a distance of over a hundred miles. They started walking until a stranger, a well-to-do Swiss, offered them a lift. So impressed was he with Agassiz’s acumen that this gentleman later wrote to his parents offering to pay for his full education. Thus began a steep career trajectory that ultimately propelled him to the United States, where he took part in the founding of two major scientific centers: the
Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the
National Academy of Sciences.

As a young family man in 1837, Agassiz took his brood on a summer vacation to the picturesque town of Bex. Lying along the Rhône River, Bex is bordered on the east and west by the
Alps. Today it is home to the only working salt mine in all of Switzerland. A narrow-gauge train takes visitors hundreds of feet beneath the earth. This vast hole was originally dug in the 1820s to quarry salt that in those days was literally worth its weight in gold. At the time of Agassiz’s visit the mine was new, and its director took great pleasure in showing summer visitors the local geology, which in this part of the Alps is hard to miss and very easy to appreciate.

Some time before Agassiz’s visit, the director and a friend had discovered a number of puzzles in the local rocks. With the arrival of Agassiz, the two were excited to quiz a visiting luminary on the meaning of these geological oddities.

Giant
boulders dotted the landscape, some the size of a caravan. That is not unusual; large boulders can be a common occurrence. But these were completely out of place, because the rock that composed the boulders was different from the local bedrock. In fact, the closest match to the boulders was in cliffs hundreds of miles away. Something had transported them, but what?

Closer inspection of the boulders revealed other clues. Scrape marks, almost as if made by a pickax, etched their surfaces. And the marks didn’t run willy-nilly; they extended in parallel lines.

More mysteries came from a bird’s-eye view of the valleys from the scenic overlooks that lie along the roadsides of this part of the Alps. Each of the mountainous valleys was bordered by ridges of gravel that looked scrunched, almost as if they had been moved by a plow or a steam engine. Since the ridges were perched on hillsides in rural valleys, these causes were obviously ruled out.

Boulders and gravel mounds told the same story: something was moving rocks around. But what?

Flowing water could be ruled out. Floods large enough to move the giant boulders would have left very obvious markings across the landscape. Of course, human activity could be ruled out as well. That left the one obvious cause—ice.

At the time of Agassiz’s visit, the ice was nestled in glaciers high up on the mountains. But what if that was only its most recent position? What if at some point in the past the ice covered the valleys below? If the levels of ice waxed and waned in and out of the valleys, then the boulders would move, and the rubble would be plowed about to make mounds and carve scrapes.

After this grand show-and-tell, Agassiz’s friends tried the ice idea out on him. To Agassiz—whose life’s modus operandi was to learn by observing—the visit sparked an epiphany. It was a set of observations that changed his world. At every scale, Switzerland’s rocks made sense when considered in the light of moving ice: scrapes on rocks told the same story as the mounds of gravel and the shapes of the valleys themselves. Agassiz’s heart raced at the thought of something even more general. His travels revealed these features weren’t limited to the Alps; they were common all over Europe, even south to the Mediterranean. Moving ice wasn’t confined to picturesque Swiss cantons; it must have covered virtually all of Europe.