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A book talk with the author Paul Bierman ’85

Sun, April 27th, 2025
7:00 pm
- 8:00 pm

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Paul Bierman Williams ‘85

Professor of Environmental Science, University of Vermont

Greenland is ground-zero for climate change as record global temperatures melt its ice and snow. In the 1950s and 1960s, the island’s massive ice sheet was the focus of US military attention and the island central to America’s Cold War strategy. Today, the Trump administration covets Greenland, putting the island back in the news.

Tonight, I’ll go back in time and examine Greenland through the lens of both natural and human history. I’ll focus on Camp Century, the nuclear-powered US military Cold War base inside the ice sheet. It was the site of the first ice core drilled to the bottom of an ice sheet and the drillers didn’t stop there. They kept going, recovering 12 feet of frozen soil in which we found plant and insect fossils – unambiguous evidence that Greenland’s ice had once vanished. Unless we address climate change head on, that ice will be gone again.

The massive melt we identified happened about 400,000 years ago, a time when Earth’s climate was naturally as warm as it is today. When ice on Greenland melts, water flows into the ocean raising sea level as much as 25 feet and flooding coastal zones around the world. If we let that happen, much of Boston, New York, and Miami will be under water and so will Jakarta and Mumbai.

Greenland’s real value to the world is its ice.

I’ll illustrate the talk with vintage photographs, film, and video and include short readings from my new book, When the Ice is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future (WW Norton, 2024).

 

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