Wilmette News Agency employees, 1920s.
By 1950, as American troops fought in the Korean winter and the chill of the Cold War settled over the world, U.S. Army planners had come to realize that they needed to know much more about the icy regions that lay between America and the Soviet Union. Most urgently, they needed to know how to build things - roads, radar stations, underground bunkers, airfields, missile silos - in places where the ground is forever frozen, the ice is a mile deep, and the snowfall never melts. This intensive research program required a special laboratory like no other, and in 1951 the Army found just the right place for it: an abandoned laundry at 1215 Washington Avenue in Wilmette, half a block west of Green Bay Road.
They called it SIPRE - the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment. (Former staff still refer to the place in conversation by its acronym: "sip-ree.") Wilmette had the advantage of being within easy reach of researchers at Northwestern University, while the sturdy, three-story structure itself, with its big rooms and alley-side garage, fit the bill perfectly. The Washington Avenue building had come into its own in the late 1920s, when Joseph Krauss added a third story and that distinctive brick smokestack in back (you can still read all but the first letter of "Krauss" on the side), and opened it with great fanfare as Krauss Cleaning and Dyeing Company in 1928. The crash of '29 seems to have been Krauss's undoing, but Shore Line Cleaners moved into the space and stayed for twenty years. When the Army Corps of Engineers got through remodeling the 11,000-square-foot interior in 1952, SIPRE housed six refrigerated "cold rooms," cooled by chemicals circulated from huge tanks on the roof and lined with cork insulation that had been coated with aluminum. The coldest of the rooms could be kept a steady 58 degrees below zero.
The SIPRE laboratory stood at the center of a pioneering global effort. For Dr. Henri Bader and the other civilian scientists and engineers who made up SIPRE's staff, the key to understanding polar conditions lay in the analysis of ancient ice crystals torn from the depths of glaciers. Each summer, teams from SIPRE ventured to some of the harshest environments in the world in search of such crystals. The Greenland ice cap held special treasures, and it was at a base camp there that teams from SIPRE figured out how to drill deep down and retrieve intact "ice cores," which would then be packed in six-foot aluminum rods and shipped by refrigerated planes and trucks to the lab on Washington Avenue. In the late 1950s, a young SIPRE geologist named Chester Langway developed ways of "reading" the layers of dust, mold, bacteria, and ancient air trapped in these ice cores, much as one would read the rings of a tree, to decipher thousands of years of climate history. Because of the commitment of Dr. Bader and his team to this kind of basic scientific research, a project created to answer immediate practical questions during the Cold War also opened up entirely new ways of exploring how and why climate change occurs. Today's scientific understanding of such phenomena as global warming would not have been possible without the research pioneered during SIPRE's ten years in Wilmette.
SPIRE expanded over time, opening office space in the Odd Fellows building next to Millen Hardware, and setting up a lab in Evanston, in another abandoned laundry. In 1961, however, the Army merged SIPRE with another agency and moved it into a purpose-built structure in Hanover, New Hampshire. The handsome terra-cotta face of the old Krauss building on Washington Avenue looks much the same today as it did fifty years ago, when specially modified Army trucks carrying arctic ice cores rumbled down the alley into its garage, and scientists around the world followed the discoveries made in its refrigerated labs. Yet few people recall the special role played by this building, and the people who worked there, in unlocking the secrets of the Earth's icy past.
Special thanks to Dr. Chester C. Langway, Jr. and to Marie Darling of CRREL for answering my questions about SIPRE.
UPDATE: Since this article appeared, Dr. Langway has written a fascinating account of the scientific work of SIPRE and its successors. His report, The history of early polar ice cores, was published by ERDC/CRREL in January of 2008. A copy may be found online in PDF format.
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