In the summer of 2022, a small but bustling town appeared atop the normally barren Greenland ice sheet . Rows of red tents flapped in the wind, and an LC-130 Hercules cargo plane occasionally delivered food, fuel, and equipment. But the camp’s main activity lay hidden 30 feet below the surface, in a network of tunnels that workers had spent weeks chainsawing into the ice.

Researchers bundled in down jackets toiled around the clock in these snowy tunnels as a massive drill rig churned downward to extract core samples and the secrets they contain from the deepest recesses of the ice sheet below.

Some of these cylindrical ice cores —each about the width of a pool noodle—hadn’t seen daylight for 100,000 years. They’re clear and flawless, “like window glass,” says Jørgen Peder Steff

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