In June 1968, Karl Philberth arrived at Jarl-Joset Station, a forlorn cluster of buildings near the center of the Greenland Ice Sheet. He had traveled for two weeks to reach this place, trundling along at walking speed in a caterpillar-tracked personnel carrier. A series of beacon towers, planted in the snow by another expedition years before, had guided the convoy across hundreds of miles of flat, wind-blown snow. Philberth was a self-employed physicist and inventor from Munich, Germany. He had come here, at age 39, to investigate an ambitious but controversial plan: to store the world’s nuclear waste deep in the ice sheets of Greenland or Antarctica.

Weasel polar vehicles pulling sleds on a two week traverse across the Greenland Ice Sheet during the 1968 expedition when Karl Philberth tested his probe. Expéditions Polaires Françaises

He had worked on this plan for a decade with his older brother, Bernhard, also an inventor. Their scientific credentials were impressive, with dozens of patents on transformers, welding machines, and other electric devices guaranteeing them financial security for life. But the Philberth brothers were hardly typical researchers: They were devoted Catholics who would soon after the expedition be ordained as priests. For them, scientific research represented not only a means for solving the problems of humankind, but also a pathway for probing religious questions.

Bernhard had advised the upper ranks of the Vatican for years on new developments in relativistic physics, atomic energy, and nuclear weapons. In 1961 he had published a book, Christian Prophecy and Nuclear Power, which equated nuclear war with scenes of apocalypse depicted in the New Testament book of Revelation. It was Bernhard, the broad conceptual thinker, who had first conceived the plan to store nuclear waste in ice sheets.

Karl, a disciplined mathematician, helped him develop this idea and many others. Now 85 years old, Karl regards his brother Bernhard (who died in 2010) as a genius—and also inspired. The nuclear waste idea, says Karl, was “shown to him” by God—“it was a vision.”

When Karl Philberth arrived in central Greenland in 1968, he planned to study whether the ice sheet would remain stable when exposed to vessels of nuclear waste so radioactive they would constantly emanate heat, like high-powered incandescent light bulbs. Packed in the convoy of caterpillar vehicles were two reinforced tubes as long as coffins, holding a pair of machines that he had built with the help of US Army engineers. Those machines would allow him to probe the depths of this 8,000-foot-thick ice in ways that no scientist had ever done.

The Philberths’ plans for nuclear waste disposal never did come to pass, but the significance of their work has endured in other, unexpected ways.

Decades after the fact, the machines that Karl Philberth designed are re-emerging as a prototype for future planetary exploration and the search for life in other worlds. Space probes based on his ice-burrowing machines may one day tunnel into the frozen shell of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to reach a vast hidden ocean that might harbor life.

The nuclear waste option

Science and religion are so often seen in opposition, but it was the Philberth brothers’ pursuit of religious truth that first led them to study physics.

Bernhard Philberth and Karl Philberth: independent physicists, engineers, and Catholic priests. courtesy Karl Philberth

Bernhard and Karl were born to middle-class parents in the south-German region of Bavaria, in 1927 and 1929, respectively; their father, a Catholic, worked as a judge. Aware that they had adopted Catholicism due to circumstance and upbringing, they spent years studying Buddhism and other religions, curious whether they might find one of these more compelling. They chose to study quantum and relativistic physics in college for a very similar reason: They hoped it would illuminate the true nature of a cosmos that they believed surely must have been conceived and built by a divine Creator. The laws of physics, says Karl Philberth, “have not just physical and mathematical consequences, but also philosophic ones.”

Bernhard is said to have felt a duty—even destiny—to use his scientific talents to solve problems of humankind. He and Karl were teenagers when atomic bombs decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They became fixated on the radioactive contamination that followed, and later, on the problem of nuclear waste as the world’s first nuclear power plants came online—in Obninsk, Russia in 1954; in Cumbria, England in 1956; and in western Pennsylvania in 1957.

Calder Hall atomic power plant in Cumbria, England was the first commercial nuclear power plant in the world when it started operation on October 17, 1956. Keystone/AP

Various ideas were circulating then about how to handle this waste. One was that it should be launched on rockets into the sun, an idea that Bernhard found frightening, given the potential for a rocket to explode and spread radioactive waste over large swaths of territory. Bernhard formally proposed his plan for storing nuclear waste in the ice sheets at a scientific meeting in Chamonix, France in 1958.

Although Bernhard Philberth’s plan would offend some modern sensibilities, it has to be considered in the context of its time. Greenland and Antarctica weren’t viewed in the same conservation-oriented light that they are today.

For one thing, plans were already in place for production of nuclear waste in Antarctica: In 1962, the US began operating a small nuclear electricity-generating plant at its main logistics hub on the continent, McMurdo Station. The plant was shut down in 1972 for safety reasons, but Antarctica was seen as fair game for exploitation in other ways. The practice of pumping untreated sewage from research bases into its coastal seas has been phased out only over the last 30 years, and international discussions of opening the continent to mining or oil prospecting erupted periodically throughout the 1960s and 70s.

A diagram of the Philberth probe used on the 1968 Greenland research expedition. Courtesy of Karl Philberth

By comparison, the nuclear waste plan that Bernhard Philberth laid out had a certain degree of elegance to it. Radioactive waste would be incorporated into glass or ceramic ingots, and each ingot sealed inside a metal sphere roughly 8 inches across. He estimated that all of the nuclear waste produced worldwide through the year 2000 could be held inside 30 million of these spheres, which could be spread over a 20-mile-wide patch of ice sheet. Those vessels of waste would melt their way into the ice sheet and remain there for 20,000 to 50,000 years before the slow flow of the ice brought them to the coastline. There they would be shed into the ocean in icebergs and sink to the bottom of the sea once the icebergs melted.

The radiation emitted by nuclear waste stems from disintegration of unstable isotopes such as strontium-90, cesium-137, and iodine-131. As atoms of these and other materials fall apart, or decay, they throw off small fragments called alpha particles and beta particles. It’s these escaping particles, along with gamma rays, that we collectively call radiation. As more and more atoms decay, the level of radioactivity of the material declines. The crux of Bernhard’s plan was that most of the unstable isotopes in nuclear waste have radioactive half-lives ranging from a few days up to several decades. So when this material exited the ice sheet and sank to the ocean thousands of years later, less than a billionth of its original radioactivity would remain.

Longer-lived components of nuclear waste—such as plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,000 years—would need to be removed from the waste before it was shipped to Antarctica. But Bernhard reasoned it was worth separating out this isotope anyway, because it could be reused as valuable fuel in other nuclear power plants.

Nuclear waste stored in the ice sheet would produce plenty of heat due to the intense radioactive decay of strontium-90 and cesium-137, which have half-lives of about 30 years. “These two nuclides must be cared for very carefully,” says Karl Philberth.

Metal spheres containing these and shorter-lived isotopes would each initially give off around 100 watts of heat, growing warm to the touch. Planted on the surface of Greenland or Antarctica, each sphere would gradually bury itself, melting and sinking into the ice as quickly as 6 feet per day.

The rate of sinking would gradually slow over months and years, as decay caused the production of radiation and heat to subside. As the spheres sank deeper, they would also encounter progressively colder layers of ice, more resistant to melting. The Philberths calculated that each sphere would eventually stop sinking, locked securely in the ice sheet somewhere between 500 and 3,000 feet beneath the surface.

There were dangers, of course.

A sphere that sank too quickly and reached the bottom of the ice sheet could be pulverized between the sliding ice and the bedrock, allowing the radioactive waste to reach the ocean much more quickly, carried there by rivers and streams flowing under the ice.

The collective heating of millions of these spheres would also warm large swaths of ice by a few degrees. And even if this didn’t melt the ice, it could still change its mechanical properties, lowering its viscosity so that it deformed and oozed more readily, potentially causing the ice sheet to flow more quickly into the ocean. The spreading heat might also cause the ice to unfreeze from the bedrock below, creating a layer of liquid water which lubricated and accelerated its flow into the ocean.

To avoid these pitfalls, the Philberths needed to map the internal temperatures and layering of the ice thousands of feet down. This was information that glaciologists of all stripes wanted to obtain, even aside from the issue of storing nuclear waste. But in the 1960s it had never been done. This is what Karl Philberth hoped to accomplish when he traveled to central Greenland in 1968, on an international expedition led by the then-Paris-based organization, Expéditions Polaires Françaises.

On thick ice

The two machines in those reinforced tubes would help Karl Philberth do this. He had spent years developing these new machines with help and funding from the US Army’s Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in Hanover, New Hampshire—a DARPAesque agency, which still operates today, focused on creating novel technologies for the world’s polar regions.

Karl Philberth (right) and Father Hugo Jännichen, a Benedictine monk, priest, and physicist (left) in the dim bottom of a snow pit, readying a thermal probe to bore into the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1968. Expéditions Polaires Françaises

After arriving at Greenland's Jarl-Joset Station in 1968, Karl and his companions took up residence in several buildings that sat submerged beneath the surface of the ice sheet – buried by years of snowfall. Over the next few weeks, they excavated two narrow pits in the ice sheet, which they would use in their experiments. From each tube they removed a metal cylinder, more than 6 feet long. They lowered these probes vertically into the two pits and connected them to an electric generator.

Each probe heated up and melted its way into the ice, steering a path straight down while paying out a coil of electrical wire behind it in the hole. Karl’s team controlled each probe from the surface. They stopped them periodically, allowing melt water to freeze and cool around the probes in the hole, so the temperature of the surrounding ice could be measured. One probe descended 650 feet before an electric short halted it. The other reached 3,300 feet, finding the ice at that depth to be -22°F.

Karl and Bernhard Philberth calculated that their nuclear storage plan would raise the temperature of the surrounding few miles of ice by no more than about 9°F—a change that in their estimation, at least, would avoid destabilizing the ice sheet.

Their plan to store nuclear waste in the ice sheets never materialized. The international Antarctic Treaty which governed human activities on the continent starting in 1961, enacted stringent environmental regulations that would prohibit disposal of radioactive waste. Countries that signed onto the treaty could have negotiated a separate plan on the storage of such waste, but the unanimous agreement required to do that presented a huge barrier. The Philberths’ plan never gained enough support to get off the ground in Greenland, either.

So the project stalled. But as often happens, the technology developed to enable it has found other uses.

Probing for alien life

The Philberth probe is now viewed as the forerunner of a new generation of ice-bots, also called cryobots, being developed by teams at NASA and elsewhere to bore thousands of feet into the Antarctic ice sheets and explore the hundreds of subglacial lakes now known to exist there. Cryobots may also one day bore into and explore the vast liquid-water oceans that hide deep inside several ice-covered moons in the outer solar system, including Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. These and several other moons collectively hold at least five times as much liquid water as all of that on Earth, and by some estimates, up to 50 or 100 times as much.

A composite image of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Caltech/SETI Institute/JPL/NASA

The most sophisticated of these modern cryobots, called Valkyrie, is being developed by Stone Aerospace, a company based in Austin, Texas, with grant money from NASA. Its current version uses a high-power laser to transmit power from generators on the surface through a fiber optic cable to the cryobot. It bores through the ice using a heated nose cone and jets of heated, recycled melt water. Ice-penetrating radar sensors will detect rocks in the ice up to 3,000 feet below, allowing the bot to steer its way around these obstacles. Bill Stone, the company’s founder, hopes in a few years to send a prototype through 10,000 feet of ice in Antarctica, into a subglacial lake located beneath South Pole Station. It will carry equipment for counting living cells and measuring chemicals and gases in the water. With luck, it will bring a sample of lake water back up to the surface.

Karl Philberth turns modest when the subject of these modern cryobots comes up. “Scientists are much more demanding these days,” he says—His original probe measured only temperature, whereas present-day scientists often want to recover intact ice cores that they can use to measure all manner of things, including trapped dust, pollen, gases, and living cells.

Divinely inspired science

Bernhard and Karl Philberth were ordained as priests four years after the Greenland expedition in 1972. But they also continued pursuing science. “The intention was for the Church to use and harness the knowledge of these two brothers to bring together religion and science,” says Walter Uhlenbruch, a retired business executive and longtime family friend of the Philberths who lives in Melbourne, Australia.

In contrast with the strident antagonism between science and religion that seems so prominent today, the Philberth brothers’ dual embrace of science and religion embodies a historical thread going back centuries. Basic optics including lenses, mirrors, and eye anatomy were codified by the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon in the 1200s (he borrowed from Islamic scientists, too). That same century Albertus Magnus, a Catholic bishop, identified dozens of minerals and correctly deduced that many of them had coalesced from magmatic fluids. Many early astronomers were also monks or priests, who worked over the centuries to develop a reliable, celestially based calendar of holidays that could be used by Catholic communities around the world.

Like their predecessors, the Philberth brothers see science as a pathway to understanding the creations of the god they believe in. Bernhard writes of “the high and still mounting evidence” for evolution in his book, Revelation, published in 1994. He likewise embraced the modern laws of quantum and relativistic physics. He saw theological implications in the Big Bang and in the equivalence of matter and energy (that is, e=mc2). And it was their core of religious beliefs that led them to study nuclear waste and glacial ice, and led Karl to design a probe that now forms the basis for searching for life in Europa.

That 1968 expedition to Greenland is now but a distant memory. Jarl-Joset Station no longer exists – abandoned, years ago, as the relentless buildup of snow crushed its buildings buried many feet below. When I spoke with Karl Philberth over the holidays, he was busy writing and delivering several Catholic Mass sermons per week; but he avidly discussed that past research, sharply recalling such minute details as the wattages of power supplies that he used in Greenland, and the half-lives of isotopes. He also spoke of his brother's divine inspiration. “God showed him sometimes a vision of a concept,” he said.