Greenland Is Very Mad About the Toxic Waste the US Left Buried Under Its Ice (vice.com)

Kate Lunau, reporting Motherboard:Greenland isn't happy about being treated as a dumping ground for abandoned US military bases established at the height of the Cold War -- and in a newspaper editorial, it's calling on Denmark to deal with the mess left behind by the Americans, since the Danish long ago took responsibility for them. This editorial notes that, after decades, Greenland is "losing its patience." One of the abandoned bases, called Camp Century, is full of nasty chemicals and some radioactive material, as Motherboard previously reported. At Camp Century, which was built in 1959, soldiers called "Iceworms" practiced deployment of missiles against Russia and literally lived inside the ice. When the US decommissioned the base in the 1960s, the military left basically everything behind, thinking that its waste would stay locked up in the Greenland ice sheet forever. Well, climate change has made that unlikely. Melting ice threatens to expose all kinds of toxic debris in decades to come, and Greenland wants it cleaned up, now.

Comments

Bases were actually in Denmark

[XXongo]

...the most damning part of this research was that it took place without Greenlands consent....

As the article points out, Greenland wasn't independent at the time; it was a possession of Denmark; and the bases were done with Denmark's knowledge and cooperation.

Ten

[Geoffrey.landis]

So.. how many countries do you know that keep military bases in other countries?

Ten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overseas_military_bases

Re:Nothing there

[amiga3D]

Come on man. We can't just leave that shit lying around and not go clean it up. Greenland doesn't have the money for that and it's really not right. We built that place for our benefit in the Cold War and they were nice enough to let us use the place. It's not good manors to leave a big mess behind.