In 1959, in the context of the Cold War, engineers US military built an underground city secret under the ice sheets of Greenland, known as Camp Century, to study the feasibility of burying nuclear missiles under the snow.
Having found that the Greenland ice sheet was not as stable as they thought, the camp was dismantled in 1969. the engineers removed the camera nuclear reaction, but left the camp infrastructure and with it, the radioactive, chemical and biological waste, thinking that would be buried forever. However, unaware of the effects that would have global warming decades later.
Waste at risk of come to the surface
Now, the merger of the Greenland ice sheet by climate change threatens to emerge hazardous waste that were frozen during the Cold war, according to a study by researchers from the universities of Colorado (United States) and York (Canada) published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the American Geophysical Union.
for the study, the researchers made an inventory of waste at Camp Century and practiced climate model simulations, in addition to analyzing historical documents of engineers US Army, to determine where waste and what risk had to be exposed were.
So, they discovered that the waste in this former US camp covering 55 hectares, which is roughly the size of a hundred football fields, and still contains a whopping 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, enough to a car around the world 80 times.
in addition, researchers believe that the construction materials used at the site containing polychlorinated biphenyls, a series of highly toxic compounds to human health, and that camp there are 240,000 liters of wastewater, including an unknown amount of low-level radioactive coolant from the nuclear generator.
“It’s just a matter of time”
The study suggests that the melting ice could bring out all these substances within 75 years, but could be earlier. “When we look at climate simulations, they suggest that instead of perpetual snow, the site could go from having an accumulation of snow have melting conditions, especially in 2090,” says William Colgan, a researcher at the University of York and lead author of the article. “it’s just a matter of time that waste is founded, which will be irreversible,” he adds.
The authors warn that toxins pose a “significant” environmental hazard. Once the ice melts, pollutants can be transported to the ocean, where most likely will damage marine ecosystems.
The responsibility for this waste
the question now is to find a solution to this problem. The researchers do not advocate an imminent cleaning Camp Century, it is still buried deep beneath the ice. “It really is a situation where we have to wait until the ice has melted,” Colgan said.
However, it is unclear who is responsible for this cleaning. The co-author of the study, Jessica Green, says that “the study identifies a large hole in the set of laws and rules we have to deal with global environmental problems”.
“The city under the ice”
In the early 50s, the US Government and Denmark agreed on the joint defense of Greenland, on territory Danish, against possible Soviet attacks. Thus, engineers United States launched two major projects. On the one hand built airbase Thule, and 240 kilometers inland they began the second project with codename:. Camp Century
The installation consisted of more than 3 kilometers of tunnels in the ice. Plus a nuclear reactor, housed between 85 and 200 soldiers and scientists who had a hospital, a small church, a small theater and other extraordinary amenities considering the location. The camp included a comprehensive system and sewer pipes, generated its own electricity and produce fresh water by drilling wells on ice with hoses high pressure steam.
The “Iceworm Project” was released in 1997 when Denmark declassified, at Parliament’s request, the documents, which revealed the tactics and geographic strategy that the United States intended to achieve in this area to develop its objectives nuclear defense in the Arctic.
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