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theories abounded about what they could mean. Four years of underwater research revealed a lost world. Near the end of the trip, the scientists retreated to the ship's cabin, hooked up to the glitchy Internet. Barred and the others were reading papers, looking at maps, thinking over what they'd seen. Slowly, over the next few months, they put together a hypothesis. Even though to a non expert, the knobs in the center of the rings might look like coral, they were not.

They were deposits formed by coralline algai, photosynthetic organisms that create skeletons made of calcium carbonate. During the last ice Age, thousands of those algae colonies likely took root on what was then a very sunny seafloor. For three thousand years or so, these algae flourished, growing outward like domes or pancakes,

measuring several yards. Then, around twenty thousand years ago, the world began to warm and continental ice sheets began to melt, funneling into the Mediterranean, which rose until the sun loving algae were drowned in darkness. Their domes collapsed, leaving only the central knobs and bits of calcium carbonate scattered like bones from a carcass around them. For thousands of years, nothing lived amid the remains that left a permanent imprint.

But about eight thousand years ago the sea levels stabilized, deep water algae laid down new layers on the central knobs, creating the film of life the diverse saw. At the same time, rhodolith algae started to encase broken bits of calcium. The nuggets of algae rolled downhill from the knobs, settling around the base of the cones in perfect circles. That's everyone's best guess. The simple tug of gravity formed the rings. We don't have all the proof, admits Bollsta. Though we

have nothing to say our history is wrong. Protecting the entire field of rings may prove difficult. Only about one third of them lie within the cap Course and Agriat Marine National Park, a French marine protected area, but the park, with help from Billesta's andromedae Oceanology, is taking on this challenge. Using data from Billesta's dives, it plans to abdocate for the further protection of all rings, even those located outside

its bounds in French and Italian waters. The park's management council will propose prohibiting the anchoring of commercial vessels in this area. Normally, with this type of regulation it takes years, Bullesta says, but because so many of the rings already exist within a conservation zone, he's optimistic. He is also no longer thinking just about the rings, but about what

they represent. Traces like these signs of the ancient coast line, including rings, submerged caves, and other mysterious structures, may be hidden all around the ocean floor. They are places for studying how the world is always building something new on the husk of a previous age. While there have been no sightings of the rings elsewhere, you have to realize that explorations at this depth have been rare in the

Mediterranean seas. Her Gent Martini says, perhaps there are others that have not yet been discovered, secrets below the surface. Too shallow for most mining and too deep for most divers, parts of the ocean floor under just a few hundred feet of water are often overlooked. Recently, pioneering teams of divers and researchers began exploring a nearly four hundred foot deep section of the Mediterranean Sea. What they found on

the bottom was shocking. Not just one giant, perfectly circular, completely mystifying ring, but one thousand, three hundred twenty five of them. What might have happened? Scientists are studying whether the highs and lows of temperature and sea water level over thousands of years dictated the growth and collapse of red algae that potentially formed the rings. Shallow start Shallow seas at the peak of the ice age let more sunlight reach the sea floor, fostering dome shaped red algae communities.

Deadly shift, melting glaciers, and rising seas killed algae. Beginning an new formations of algae grew atop dead layers. Unattached clumps tumbled to the edges of circles creating rings. Next the rediscovered secrets of Project ice Worm. At the height of the Cold War, a classified military program built an improbable nuclear bass under the Arctic ice. Now scientists are taking a French fresh look at what went on there and drawing critical new insights about climate change. By Neil Schay.

On a freezing day in October nineteen sixty, a team of U. S. Army technicians toiling at the top of the world stood in the belly of a glacier, making the final preparations that would bring a nuclear reactor to life. It was an experimental model, smallish and fickle, and these, of course, were the early years of atomic energy. The men knew that a single burst of radiation could kill them.

They were surrounded by walls of glistening snow that muffled their voices, reflected the beams cassd by their lights, and absorbed the tick ticking of their Geiger counters. Far above their heads arched a ceiling of corrugated steel. Beneath their feet lay a mile thick slab of ice so old

it reached back to the Plistocene. When the chain reaction finally began There was a flash of relief, maybe a tight shout of triumph in the nearby control room, but within minutes the team was scrambling to shut the reactor down. Somewhere deep in the ice was a leak. Radioactive neutrons

were spilling into the darkness. Imagine the men there for a moment, encased in a glacier in Greenland, struggling to fire up a reactor, perhaps the only humans to be so perfectly suspended between the ice age and the atomic age. No one had ever done what they were doing, and no one would ever try it again publicly. The elaborate gambit they were a part of was meant to project

American ingenuity. The careful construction of a vast under ice military base aimed Camp Century that would show the world that the United States could transform even the coldest, harshest environment into a habitable place. It would be the ice sport to end all ice forts. The world's first atomic powered military station carved into a glacier was a triumph of engineering, a victory over the elements, its brave crews

bringing civilization and scientific rigor to the polar waste. After Camp century was up and running, newspapers and magazines, including National Geographic, sent reporters to visit the Arctic outpost and tour its labyrinth of tunnels, all lit up by that reactor, by then its leak fixed with lead bricks and a

lot of inventive engineering. What the visiting journalists weren't told, nor were many of the soldiers living at the station, which could house up to two hundred, was that Camp Century was a cover for a secret Cold War Army project, Unknown even to Greenland's Danish government, the plan remained classified for decades. America's ambition in the frozen North wasn't so much about developing portable atomic power as it was about turning the ice cap into a sprawling ballistic missile base.

The Army, according to now declassified documents, cited the area's unique adaptability to nuclear deployment. Remote near Russia and hard to target. The plan, known as Project ice Worm, imagined threading the tunnels of Camp Century and beyond with railway tracks that could covertly house and transport up to six hundred nuclear tipped missiles that could be aimed over the pole at the Soviet Union. To day, nothing of that

audacious military scheme remains. Camp Century was abandoned long ago by the Army, and its tunnels beneath the snow were crushed and swallowed by the restless ice. But a more surprising legacy endurers thanks to several long overlooked jars stashed away in deep free storage for decades, some of the last remnants of an unheralded scientific project performed at Camp Century.

The unexpected evidence inside those jars is now offering modern scientists a startling glimpse into the wetter, wilder, and more chaotic age that may await us. For the seven years that the base was operational, personnel at Camp Century labored and lived in extreme isolation. The base lay one hundred twenty seven miles away from the nearest human outpost, an Air Force base called Thuel. Shipments of food, fuel, and equipment were dragged on sleds to Century in long convoys

known as swings. This was how people reached the camp too. Austin Kobak's, an Army research engineer now in his eighties who spent several seasons living at the camp, remembers that traveling by swaying took many hours, even in the best conditions, and in bad weather, blizzards, white outs, the severe gold cold that could fall like a hammer. The journey like take days. Sometimes swings even got lost in the endless arctic void. Still, the real risk, Kovac says, was boredom.

At the camp. People thought it was dangerous, and it was not dangerous. It was uncomfortable, and at times it was very, very monotonous. The men lived in prefabricated bunk houses constructed inside the ice. Kovacs worked in what was called Trench thirty three, where he researched and studied foundations to support large buildings on polar ice caps. There was no sunlight, no bird song, no breeze. Movies were shown in the base theatre at least once a week. The

library offered a modest collection of books. The men showered and shaved in a communal bathroom eight in a bright mess hall. All kinds of ways, trash, sewage, industrial chemicals, even the radioactive water used to cool the reactor was dumped back into the glacier, where it remains frozen in place for now. They drank water drawn from a well

in the glacier. Once, when Kobak's and his comrades needed excitement, they lowered themselves down the wells, still cable dropping down a clusterphobically narrow ice shaft into an enormous, pitch black cavern. Hanging there in utter darkness was a thrill. Kovak's remembers waking in the morning to a woman's voice in song piped through the camp's loud speaker. It was a popular song at the time, he recalls, but after a while, after weeks and weeks, it got to be too much.

You just wanted her to stop. Enough time has passed that now Kovaks can't recollect the song or the singer, just the way her voice drifted through the darkness. I wish I could remember her name. While Kobak's focused on his research, other men serviced the reactor or studied the movements of snow at the bottom of the base. One team was busy drilling a hole deep into the ice. In nineteen sixty six, after several years of steady labor, the men punched through the bottom of the glacier to

the very service of green Land itself. They drilled more than four thousand feet, gathering in the process the first ice cores to ever penetrate an ice sheet, and almost on a whim, they went farther too, collecting eleven and a half feet of ancient frozen soil. They only stopped when a drill bearing burned out. That soil would form one of camp centuries most haunting legacies, though at the

time no one thought much of it. For years after the base was abandoned, the soil was stored in jars in a freezer in Buffalo, New York, before being moved to a freezer in Denmark. There was little to suggest that something enlightening might be inside those jars, and few, if any, tools could help unlock their significance. It was only in twenty nineteen that Paul Biermann, a geoscientist and professor at the University of Vermont, and several of his

colleagues began to study the contents of the jars. What they found has revolutionized our understanding of Greenland's ancient climate and offered a glimpse of our own possible future. Trapped in the soil Biermann's team discovered were bits of leaves, twigs, bosses, even insects. The remains could only have come from a time when the region was free of ice, not smothered in a mile thick glacier. The discovery painted a new

picture of Greenland's past. There are things we can learn about ice sheets that we can never learn from the ice itself, says Bierman. It comes from the stuff below the ice. The soil samples provoked a radical departure from earlier vaguer thinking that Greenland's ice cap was a couple

of million years old. Working with dozens of other scholars, Bierman showed that the ice cap was younger than anyone had imagined, The soil providing evidence that the land under Camp Century was ice free about four hundred thousand years ago, during a period in which the land mass had been slightly warmer than it is today and when sea levels

were significantly higher. What emerges from the data, he explains, isn't merely an image of the past, but also perhaps a clearer vision of a future in which quadrillions of gallons of fresh water currently locked up in the Greenland ice cap melt into the ocean. If that happens, the impacts will be felt nearly everywhere, as coastal cities and farms are inundated, potentially turning billions of humans into climate refugees. It's eezy to car compartmentalize Greenland, to say, oh, that's

the Arctic. It doesn't matter to me, says Bierman. But the long forgotten soil from Camp Sentry draws a straight line to the critical issue of our age. It takes you from nineteen sixty six to global climate change and onward to the effects of Greenland's melting. That's pretty profound.

Project ice Worm was doomed from the start. What those Cold Warriors seem to have miscalculated when they were sketching out their missile tunnels beneath the snow was how much they could prevent glaciers from behaving as if they're alive, they slide and shrink, grow and flow. Building inside the glacier was too unstable and required too much maintenance. Rigid steel railways could buckle under the movement of the ice.

Missiles might tip over. The atomic reactor, connected to a web of pipes, vents, and conduits that were themselves in motion, was at risk as the ice below it shifted. Soldiers armed with electric chainsaws roamed the narrow tunnels, working like sculptures, carving back the relentless snow. Army planners eventually had to admit that none of this was a good idea. In nineteen sixty three, the camp's reactor was shut down, and

three years later, Century itself was abandoned. When Kovac returned in nineteen sixty nine to conduct a survey, he found a total ruin. In a series of photographs he made of the base, one could see something like a mining disaster unfolding in slow motion. Tongues of snow spilled down passageways, steel structures collapse on themselves, wood beams splinter like bones. The photos give form to the glaciers, overwhelming in otherwise

invisible weight. Humans had been gone only a short time, but already there was the suggestion of an inevitable one way journey, the debris being crushed, then swallowed, never to rise again, all but forgotten for half a century. The camp today delivers a clear eyed picture of Cold War excess, as well as a dose of nostalgia for a time of grandiose projects. Think of all the energy and resources

it took to do this. Bearman says, to build those tunnels and put soldiers down there, it's almost science fiction. No one would dream of doing that today. For all that planning. None of the base as big thinking architects would ever have imagined that camp centuries enduring legacy would be the research conducted there, all part of the guise

to hide the camp's ulterior nuclear aims. Scientists like Beerman are grateful for that irony, especially when you realize those guys drilling down in that trench back in nineteen sixty six had no idea what would happen, no idea how important it would be, and they just kept going Arctic ambitions.

Camp Century, completed in nineteen sixty was a pilot project for an ultimately unrealized but even more audacious plan to build hundreds of miles of connected tunnels, rail tracks, and missile silos across the Greenland ice sheet Dubbed twenty five feet below the snow. The camp provided both the comforts of home and cutting edge research facilities in one of

the world's most inhospitable regions, advanced laboratories. Work in the research labs was conducted by civilians and military personnel, alike experts in fields such as geology, placiology, and seismology. Space age water supply developed by Camp Century engineer Rao Brigez This well dropped a steam heated element into the ice, creating a reservoir that provided the base with ten thousand gallons of water a day. Today, Nassau is exploring rod

wells for water extraction on Mars. Sustainable power electricity was supplied by a portable nuclear reactor to avoid the logistical challenge of transporting a steady supply of diesel fuel for generators generators across the ice sheet. This was one of eight small reactors part of a now defunct U. S Army program to power far flung cold war bases. An icy main street, the primary access tunnel, wide enough for large vehicles, served as the major artery for the base.

It was maintained by dedicated staff who cleared snow drifts and scraped walls to prevent moisture from a accumulating as ice cold comfort. The camp included a small library at chapel, a gymnasium in a movie theater that showed films regularly. Residents pass the time playing chess and cards, reading and writing letters. Fresh air in hot air out A ventilation system sucked in cold surface air through escape patches, then blew it through the tunnels and out toward the surface. Tunnel.

Air temperature had to be kept at five degree fahrenheit to prevent melting dumping. Nuclear waste spent in highly radioactive uranium rods were returned to the US for disposal. Less radioactive waste water was diverted to a well more than three hundred feet away from the camp. Next, Ghosts of the Guano Islands in Peru, a photographer finds a novel way to pay homage to seabirds that were lost In

the nineteenth century. Ships full of workers sailed to islands off the coast of Peru to mine a precious resource, bird excrement, or guano, deposited by seabirds like cormorants, pelicans, and boobies. The chalky white material was sold as fertilizer to farmers around the world, but at an environmental cost. As trade increased, more people disturbed the bird's habitat, contributing to severe pollution declines on the order of population declines

on the order of tens of millions. The steep drop in numbers inspired photographer and National Geographic Explorer Thomas Peschek to resurrect the ghosts of sea birds passed into a modern day landscape and says. In these archival photographs, se products images onto now diminished areas of the islands to share a unique perspective of the seabird crisis by Elena Zakos. Brutal conditions. Guano mining was not only an environmental concern,

but also a humanitarian tragedy during the eighteen hundreds. Many workers were indentured servants or prisoners, forced to use pick axes to collect the excrement. The backdrop for this archival image is Isla Guanape morte hauling guano. Guano harvesting ships are displayed on stacked bags of recently gathered excrement on Isla Asia. Today, guana mining is still profitable, though highly regulated. The islands and their birds are protected by Peru's government.

Next the tiny forest of a Bonzai Giant by Becky Little. The ancient art of bonza i may look deceptively simple, but its practice requires care, contemplation, and consistency over long periods of time, especially if you're growing an entire miniature forest like the famous living artifact known as goshin. This Bonsa I was started more than seventy years ago when Japanese American Banzai artist John Naka cut the top off a mature juniper tree and planted it in a pot.

Over the next two decades, he surrounded it with ten more trees, one to honor each of his grandchildren. He named this miniature forests Gashin, which means protector of the spirit in Japanese. Today, Goshen is on display at the National Bonzai and Pengin Museum, part of the National Arboretum in Washington, d C. With the important distinction of being

one of the world's best known Bonzai arrangements. Naka died in two thousand and four, the age of eighty nine, but spent the last decades of his life teaching curators how to continue to care for the forest. According to his vision, for a tree to be healthy, you have to let it grow out and gain strength, says Michael James, curator at the museum. But when you do that, it gets out of shape. It doesn't look like a banzai anymore, so then you have to cut it back. That means

no bonzai is ever truly finished. With proper attention, Goshin could live on for years. While bonzai is a historic Japanese art form dating back centuries. Early artists were likely inspired by the Chinese practice of pejing, which can be traced to the Han dynasty some two thousand years ago. Pjing involves creating miniature potted landscapes that can include trees, rocks, water,

human and animal figurines, and other features. But what sets Bonzai arrangement apart is there their sole focus on maintaining small trees with specific techniques for shaping that allow them to resemble much larger specimens. Naka, who was born in Fort Lupton, Colorado, discovered the practice after he moved at age eight with his parents to their home country of Japan. There,

his grandfather introduced him to the art of bonzai. Nakav returned to Colorado in his twenties and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he helped found the California Bonzai Society. In the decades that followed, he became known nationally and worldwide as both an artist and a teacher. Naka gave Gasheen to the National Bonzai and Pengin Museum in nineteen eighty four. Today, Gashin stands out among Naka's Bonzai designs

because of how large its trees are. It stands at nearly five feet at its tallest point, and how closely Naka was able to place them together. This is particularly difficult to do without overpruning the roots, which can cause the trees to wither and die. He would come every year and help the museum curators work on Gashin. James says about Naka's dedication to teaching the art to others, we are trying to preserve it. How he would have

trunk textures. Bonzai artists create areas on the tree that resemble deadwood portions that lose their bark and are bleached by sunlight. Stripped branches are known as jin, while barkless trunks are called shari tree types. Banzai can be crafted from a wide range of trees. For his forest, Naka chose the Chinese juniper, whose immature, needle like foliage offers

opportunities for sculpting putting down roots. An important part of Banzai art is cultivating exposed roots called nebari that flare out from the base, making smaller trees resemble much bigger ones for the birds. In Banzai art, foliage and branches should have space between them to help each arrange feel distinct. As artist John Naka reportedly equipped, leave room for the

birds to fly through structural support. Bonzi artists use wires to make branches sore or sag, adding to the illusion that the trees are much larger than they actually are. The wire pulls a branch towards the ground, bearing it all. When lightning strikes tall trees that can result in dead spires that rise above the foliage. The nude trunks at the top of Gaushen mimic this phenomenon big and small.

Bigger trees may draw the eye at first, but Naka believed the most important in Bonzai arrangements are both the largest and the smallest. The littlest tree at the back gives death to Gaushen secrets to living super small bombader beetle. When threatened, this insect has an explosive defense that produces an internal chemical reaction that releases a scalding and irritating fluid that can reach two hundred and twelve degrees fahrenheit. It sprays the liquid from its rear end to repel predators.

Diving bell spider, the only spider to live its whole life underwater, collects air bubbles from the surface using its abdominal hairs and carries them to a woven silk diving bell. The bell doubles as a gill, transferring oxygen from the water to help provide a twenty four hour supply. Tiger beetle. This beetle's long, thin legs help it reach unbelievable speeds,

whether chasing prey or running from predators. In Australia, one less than an inch long species can run up to eight feet a second, among the fastest in the insect world. Peacock's spider. Instead of using a web, this jumping spiders stalks and pounces on its prey with incredible accuracy. Like most spiders, it has eight eyes that produce a nearly three hundred sixty degree view, but it's the two forward facing ones that create its high resolution color vision. Damsel fly.

When laying eggs underwater, a female damsel fly can survive up to ninety minutes by breathing air in a bubble surrounding her body. After resurfacing, she moves her abdomen repeatedly, attracting males looking to mate to help her from the water. Heating the hill. The sprawling mounds of the redwood ant Formica Polychchina are the largest above ground ant nests in the world. They are also heat retaining wonders thanks to the thermoregulating prowess of millions of ants devoted to sustaining

themselves and their young in Europe's Chili forests. After hibernating underground for the winter, the colony sun bathes outside or uses body fat reserves to vibrate and radiate heat, quickly increasing the nests internal structure. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for Tiday. Your reader has been Marshall. If you've enjoyed hearing this content, please give us a call at eight five nine four two two six three nine zero. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.