It sounds like something out of science fiction: In the late 1950s, the US Army carved a tiny “city” into the Greenland ice sheet, 800 miles from the North Pole. It had living facilities, and scientific labs, and working showers, all powered by one small nuclear reactor.

The research base was called “Camp Century,” a Cold War scientific project that helped researchers deepen their understanding of ice. As part of their efforts, they wound up drilling close to a mile down through the ice sheet to pull up an ice core: a series of long cylinders of ice that serve as a record of Earth’s history, with everything from atmospheric gases to volcanic fallout preserved in their tightly packed layers.

The ice from Camp Century has been thoroughly sampled and studied since it first came out of the i

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