The Golden Age of offbeat Arctic research

Enlarge / At the US Army’s Camp Century on the Greenland ice sheet, an Army truck equipped with a railroad wheel conversion rides on 1,300 feet of track under the snow. (credit: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University)

In recent years, the Arctic has become a magnet for climate change anxiety, with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for signs of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation. It wasn’t always that way.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s...