Post by Nugget on Aug 16, 2016 10:08:57 GMT -6
Buried below the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, there's an abandoned U.S. Army base. Camp Century had trucks, tunnels, even a nuclear reactor. Advertised as a research station, it was also a test site for deploying nuclear missiles.
The camp was abandoned almost 50 years ago, completely buried below the surface. But serious pollutants were left behind. Now a team of scientists says that as climate warming melts the ice sheet, those pollutants could spread.
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century in 1959, an Army film touted it as an engineering marvel — a cavernous home dug into the ice sheet, big enough for up to 200 people. Some sections were more than 100 feet deep. "On the top of the world," the film's narrator intoned, "below the surface of a giant ice cap, a city is buried. Today on the island of Greenland, as part of man's continuing efforts to master the secrets of survival in the Arctic, the United States Army has established an unprecedented nuclear powered Arctic research center."
Yes, there was research going on. But what the public did not know about was a secret effort there called Project Iceworm.
Engineers built railways running along huge tunnels. The plan was to test the idea of putting nuclear missiles on tracks below the ice, aimed at the Soviet Union.
But the ice sheet began shifting. The Army realized that the tunnels wouldn't last, so they abandoned the camp in 1967. Ice and snow continued to accumulate, burying it even deeper.
Five years ago, an arctic researcher in Greenland heard stories about the camp. "When you go to the site nowadays," William Colgan says, "it just looks like flat white. It looks like everywhere else on the ice sheet, but it's only when you start to understand what lies beneath the site that it takes on a special significance."
Colgan is a physical geographer at York University in Canada. He found unclassified records that described what was left behind there — for example, the nuclear reactor was removed, but low-level radioactive cooling water used in it was not. The camp also stored lots of diesel fuel for generators and vehicles. There were very likely PCBs, which are toxic compounds in electrical equipment. And sumps dug into the snow stored human waste.
There's no record of how much remained. Colgan says the Army figured all of it would be entombed forever. "They thought it would snow in perpetuity," he says, "and the phrase they used was that the waste would be preserved for eternity by perpetually accumulating snow."
The camp was abandoned almost 50 years ago, completely buried below the surface. But serious pollutants were left behind. Now a team of scientists says that as climate warming melts the ice sheet, those pollutants could spread.
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century in 1959, an Army film touted it as an engineering marvel — a cavernous home dug into the ice sheet, big enough for up to 200 people. Some sections were more than 100 feet deep. "On the top of the world," the film's narrator intoned, "below the surface of a giant ice cap, a city is buried. Today on the island of Greenland, as part of man's continuing efforts to master the secrets of survival in the Arctic, the United States Army has established an unprecedented nuclear powered Arctic research center."
Yes, there was research going on. But what the public did not know about was a secret effort there called Project Iceworm.
Engineers built railways running along huge tunnels. The plan was to test the idea of putting nuclear missiles on tracks below the ice, aimed at the Soviet Union.
But the ice sheet began shifting. The Army realized that the tunnels wouldn't last, so they abandoned the camp in 1967. Ice and snow continued to accumulate, burying it even deeper.
Five years ago, an arctic researcher in Greenland heard stories about the camp. "When you go to the site nowadays," William Colgan says, "it just looks like flat white. It looks like everywhere else on the ice sheet, but it's only when you start to understand what lies beneath the site that it takes on a special significance."
Colgan is a physical geographer at York University in Canada. He found unclassified records that described what was left behind there — for example, the nuclear reactor was removed, but low-level radioactive cooling water used in it was not. The camp also stored lots of diesel fuel for generators and vehicles. There were very likely PCBs, which are toxic compounds in electrical equipment. And sumps dug into the snow stored human waste.
There's no record of how much remained. Colgan says the Army figured all of it would be entombed forever. "They thought it would snow in perpetuity," he says, "and the phrase they used was that the waste would be preserved for eternity by perpetually accumulating snow."
Once again I am reminded of how easy it is to hide events such as this from the world, but it isn't possible to hide it-or the consequences- from Mother Nature.
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