"The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice" follows the story of Camp Century, a Cold War military base built beneath the Greenland ice sheet. Before the base was abandoned, researchers drilled 1.3 kilometers through the ice and continued drilling into the sediment below.
Tammy Rittenour is a professor at Utah State University and director of the USU Luminescence Laboratory. She and her lab are featured in the documentary, though their role in it is a bit different than others.
“What I worked on wasn’t actually the ice. It was the sediments underneath the ice, which is what makes it unique," Rittenour said.
Those sediments contained preserved moss, twigs, and insects, evidence that the area had once been ice-free. But looking at the ice core alone, researchers could not determine how long ago it was without ice.
That’s where Rittenour came in. Her lab uses luminescence dating, a method that estimates when sediment was last exposed to sunlight.
“The little sand grains glow. The longer they’ve been buried, the older they are, the more brightly they glow.”
Their work showed that the upper layer of sediment was about 400,000 years old. That means the area around Camp Century lost its ice during a naturally warmer period.
Rittenour said that history provides a warning as greenhouse gas concentrations rise and Greenland’s ice sheet melts today.
“If the Earth can naturally oscillate, naturally form and melt the Greenland ice sheet, today, at the rates that we’re changing things, we are looking at a case where we’re likely to lose the Greenland ice sheet the same way as we did 400,000 years ago, but at a much faster pace," she said.
In the end, the film won the 2026 Emmy Award for Outstanding Science and Technology Documentary. Rittenour said the recognition matters because the film grew out of federally funded research. She said this gives the public a way to see how important federally funded science is.
The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice released for streaming on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Fandango, YouTube, Vimeo, and cable TV (Xfinity, Comcast, and Armstrong).
