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Mysterious, Ice-Buried Cold War Military Base May Be Unearthed By Climate Change (sciencemag.org)
Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie: a secret military operation hidden beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. But that's exactly what transpired at Camp Century during the Cold War. In 1959, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the subterranean city under the guise of conducting polar research -- and scientists there did drill the first ice core ever used to study climate. But deep inside the frozen tunnels, the corps also explored the feasibility of Project Iceworm, a plan to store and launch hundreds of ballistic missiles from inside the ice.
The military ultimately rejected the project, and the corps abandoned Camp Century in 1967. Engineers anticipated that the ice -- already a dozen meters thick -- would continue to accumulate in northwestern Greenland, permanently entombing what they left behind. Now, climate change has upended that assumption. New research suggests that as early as 2090, rates of ice loss at the site could exceed gains from new snowfall. And within a century after that, melting could begin to release waste stored at the camp, including sewage, diesel fuel, persistent organic pollutants like PCBs, and radiological waste from the camp's nuclear generator, which was removed during decommissioning.
The military ultimately rejected the project, and the corps abandoned Camp Century in 1967. Engineers anticipated that the ice -- already a dozen meters thick -- would continue to accumulate in northwestern Greenland, permanently entombing what they left behind. Now, climate change has upended that assumption. New research suggests that as early as 2090, rates of ice loss at the site could exceed gains from new snowfall. And within a century after that, melting could begin to release waste stored at the camp, including sewage, diesel fuel, persistent organic pollutants like PCBs, and radiological waste from the camp's nuclear generator, which was removed during decommissioning.
OK, I'm replying to myself here after RTFA. The dump is situated at the accumulation zone of the Greenland ice sheet, so if the earth's average temperature increases by five degrees C, anything buried that deep at the site will surface after 80 years.
This is land ice, not surface sea ice (which is declining year by year: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?... for a time-lapse). Land ice is declining in the rest of of Greenland which lies outside the accumulation zone.
Actually I don't think the point of all this is that we should be alarmed about this dump; it's more of a "ha-ha, look at that" story like the one in 2013 about the boat with climate scientists that got stuck in ice. Not so much substantive as ironic.
The US and USSR both did a lot of crazy shit during the Cold War. Today, chemical weapons are disposed of via thermal or chemical degradation (and are generally not made anymore), but from 1916 to the 1960s, we built those things assuming we were going to use them, and we made them hard to disassemble. So when they reached the end of their lifetimes we routinely disposed of them by dropping them into the ocean.
Meanwhile the USSR had a nasty habit of doing above-ground nuclear tests in Kazakhstan to see what the effects would be on a civilian population. They purposely didn't warn their citizens there (the USSR didn't have that kind of a government) and surprised them with mushroom clouds. Three generations later, babies are still being born or miscarried that have no arms, no skeletons, eyes in the wrong places or missing altogether, etc.
uhh... you do realize those fuel rods are in lead shields right? they have Geiger counters and shit around.
what protective equipment is gonna help you handling a fuel rod? wearing 100lbs of lead?
so long its sealed in a cask and you don't have dust around its fine... the army is not completely retarded