When the Army Corps of Engineers first drilled ice cores in Greenland, they had no idea what they were looking at. The cores sat there until a leading scientist took the time to analyze them properly. What he found challenged everything the scientific community thought they knew about climate stability. The ice revealed evidence of extreme, catastrophic climate shifts happening not over millennia, but in spans so short they defied the gradualist models of the time. This wasn't a search for catastrophic change. It was an accidental discovery that forced a complete rethinking of how volatile Earth's climate system actually is. The data didn't care what anyone expected to find.