A Secret Underground U.S. Military Base Is Now Consumed By Chemical & Radioactive Waste

These sufficiently old to recollect the Chilly Struggle will recall a interval of nuclear buildup between the superpowers the U.S. and the Soviet Union (now Russia). Finally, tensions thawed, however reminiscences of this tense Twentieth-century period are being delivered to gentle once more as one thing else thaws: the arctic ice caps.

In April 2024, NASA radar noticed an abandoned city under ice in Greenland. Camp Century, constructed by the U.S. navy within the late Nineteen Fifties, was, amongst different issues, a storehouse for nuclear weapons throughout the Chilly Struggle. Now it’s the problematic website of an infinite amount of chemical and radioactive waste.

Why Camp Century Was Constructed

The Chilly Struggle outpost was meant as a nuclear missile website

Camp Century correctly dates again to 1951. That’s the yr the U.S. and Denmark, which ruled Greenland until 1979, mutually pledged to defend the world’s largest island and website of the huge Greenland Ice Sheet. Camp Century was born from this cooperative settlement, though the U.S. doesn’t seem to have informed Denmark every thing it had in thoughts for the navy set up.

The U.S. Military Corps of Engineers started constructing the camp solely 800 miles from the North Pole in 1959, and it is a outstanding feat of engineering, though the underground “metropolis below the ice” was by no means completely accomplished. The challenge was finally scrapped in 1967. However not earlier than the U.S. had taken the first-ever ice core samples and begun planning for putting in nuclear missiles that would hearth by means of the ice sheet towards the Soviet Union within the occasion of a conflict.

Underground tunnels have been constructed to accommodate missiles, plus scientists and troopers. Initially, the thought was to put in as much as 52,000 sq. miles of tunnels. Solely about two miles have been truly completed, greater than 25 feet beneath the ice, containing amenities like laboratories, a hospital, and base amenities to accommodate as much as 200 navy personnel. The arctic outpost was powered by a cellular nuclear generator—the world’s first.

Why Radioactive Waste Is A Drawback

When the ice melts, waste supplies may trigger an environmental catastrophe

There are many adventurous issues to do in Greenland, together with mountaineering the 100-mile-long Arctic Circle trail. Getting there may be simpler than ever, too, due to a new and larger international airport in Greenland.

However there are limits to the place guests can go. Eighty percent of the nation continues to be coated by the huge Greenland Ice Sheet, and that features the problematic Camp Century, the place massive quantities of hazardous waste nonetheless await cleanup. How a lot is there? So much. There are over 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel alone.

A good better amount of wastewater (63,000 gallons), comprising each sewage and radioactive coolant from the previous nuclear generator, must be disposed of earlier than it reenters the surroundings with deleterious results. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs—a good better concern—are additionally current.

As soon as the ice melts, these supplies are at risk of ending up within the ocean, the place they may trigger a big disruption to marine life. A cleanup is indicated, clearly. Nonetheless, a number of obstacles should be overcome first, together with the extraordinarily pricey and difficult logistics of such an operation. Then, there’s the looming dispute over which nation is definitely chargeable for cleansing up the mess.

The Dispute Over Who Cleans Up The Mess

The U.S., Greenland, and Denmark are all in dispute

The U.S. wasn’t the one nation to construct unusual bunkers, weapons caches, and storage tunnels. The Eiffel Tower has a secret underground military bunker and there may be nonetheless a deserted German military base in Venice. However while you decommission these websites, you’re supposed to wash up afterward. The U.S. didn’t try this when it deserted Camp Century in 1967. After all, the nation probably didn’t assume anybody would discover given what it assumed can be everlasting snow and ice cowl.

That’s not the case, since components of the camp have already been uncovered. When will hazardous waste be uncovered? In keeping with a examine on the topic printed in Geophysical Research Letters, maybe as quickly as 2090 assuming the ice sheet continues to soften at its present fee.

“As soon as the location transitions from internet snowfall to internet soften, it’s solely a matter of time earlier than the wastes soften out; it turns into irreversible,” William Colgan, lead creator of the examine, famous by way of
press release
.

That timeline leaves loads of time for cleanup operations, however no nation has taken duty. The U.S. left the mess, however it’s a extra urgent drawback for Greenland, which is now self-ruled however nonetheless depends on Denmark for points like self-defense. The latter, it is going to be remembered, was answerable for the island when the challenge was accredited.

All three nations should work collectively to unravel the problem, which is now a political one with monumental future implications for the surroundings.