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Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away    June 25,
2006|Robert Lee Hotz | Times Staff Writer  University of
Colorado climatologist Konrad Steffen set up Swiss Camp in 1990
to study the weather along the equilibrium line. As a
precaution, Steffen, 54, built the camp on a plywood platform to
keep it afloat when the ice turns into summer slush and open
lakes before refreezing in the fall.  Even so, Steffen and
Zwally often spent days chiseling out tables and chairs had
frozen in floodwater into a single block of ice.  Zwally joined
his colleagues there on May 8 in the regular spring migration of
scientists to the Arctic.  He has been coming to Swiss Camp
every year since 1994 and has been studying the polar regions
since 1972, monitoring the polar ice through satellite sensors.
Eventually he realized he had to study the ice firsthand.  The
ice sheet seemed such a stolid reservoir of cold that many
experts had been confident of it taking centuries for