31. Setting Out to Actually Melt the Arctic
Humble Oil only boasted about its ability to melt the Polar ice caps, but did not actually propose an idea to deliberately melt them. Not so the Soviet Union, which actively sought to get rid of the Arctic in the name of progress. Today, melting polar ice caps are a major concern, seeing as how the resultant rise in sea levels threatens low-lying coastal plains around the world where billions live. However, in the 1950s, when most people had never even heard of “global warming”, let alone understood its ramifications, things were pretty different.
Back then, polar ice was seen by many not as something positive worth preserving, but as a negative that should be gotten rid of, the sooner, the better. The idea of getting rid of the polar ice cap was especially popular in the USSR, a huge chunk of which lay under permafrost. The frozen conditions held up many economic development projects, so authorities explored plans to warm up the country. The idea that got the most traction was to melt the entire Arctic ice cap.