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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.
Do yourself a favor and have a look at the youtube video in the NPR link. It was produced by the war department. It's fascinating. I especially like how the solders were handling the fuel rods in t-shirts and no protective equipment at all.
I am quite sure every single one of those poor guys died a horrible death not long after.
http://www.npr.org/sections/th...
Wow, I hope we'll be able to organize a clean-up party in the next 170 years, before the waste starts to be exposed!
Based on past reactions to known situations of looming environmental catastrophes, this appears highly unlikely.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
The US also had a series of DYE radar installations on the Greenland Ice Sheet - together they made up the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line. Climate scientists drilled ice cores at those locations as well.
I used to work in an ice core climate research group. I've never been to any of the DYE stations (although I did spent parts of some summers on the Greenland ice sheet); but there's a simple reason why those ice cores were drilled at these defense installations - logistics. It's difficult and expensive to get to, set up, and maintain a camp on the ice sheet. Piggybacking on already-existing military infrastructure saves time and money.
#DeleteChrome
Back in the Dark Ages, before smartphones and Pokemon Go, every schoolchild in the United States of America learned about the Viking settlements in Greenland.
Those settlements included dairy farms.
Those settlements were there, doing well, for 269 years.
They eventually shut down when the glacier moved south, it being really difficult to graze cattle on top of a glacier.
The Greenland ice sheet has not been there forever, people. Its progress southward can be tracked in the historical records from the Vikings. They left behind detailed notes on the development of the glacier, because it affected where the boats could make landfall.