“It’s a new breed of political challenge we have to think about”.
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They published their study in the journal of Geographical Research – Earth Surface.
“The question is whether it’s going to come out in hundreds of years, in thousands of years, or in tens of thousands of years”. In the mid-1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that idea was impractical, and Camp Century was shut down. Five years ago, an Arctic researcher in Greenland heard stories about the camp. When the project was ultimately rejected, the nuclear reactor that powered the camp was removed and then the site was “abandoned by just closing the door and letting the snow fall”, Colgan said. To the public, its mission was scientific tasks such as drilling for ice cores. The Americans left the base, which was used as a nuclear missile testing site, under the assumption that snowfall would it cover it up.
The Danish government did not know at the time about the Project Iceworm.
NASA used its innovative equipment to create a one-of-a-kind map to show the condition of the underground portion of the Greenland ice sheets and its temperature called basal state.
Today Camp Century is totally buried under six decades of snow. The team analyzed historical US army engineering documents to determine where and how deep the wastes were buried and how much the ice cap had moved since the 1950s. Colgan is a climate and glacier scientist at York University in Toronto, and a research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colo. The methods were – Examining results from eight recent computer models of the ice sheet, studying ice sheet layers by radars, looked the maximum velocity at which the ice could flow and still be frozen, looked for rugged surface by studying imagery from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometeres. “We don’t yet have enough detail to map exactly what all is down there, but the outline is clear”. Built 8.0 meters (26.2 feet) beneath the Greenland ice sheet, the facility was as long as 100 football fields and contained a portable nuclear reactor room, hospital, kitchen and dining area, administrative offices, laboratories, quarters for personnel, church, library and barber shop, as well as other buildings, all connected by long tunnels, covered in corrugated steel arches.
The scientists’ analysis of the 136-acre site revealed that it may contain 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 63.000 gallons of waste water, including sewage.
The researchers also obtained military records and tallied up the list of waste materials from the former Camp Century site. “Maybe in a century, they’re going to start to melt out”.
Colgan says he first became interested by Camp Century and its buried history after travelling to the base in 2010.
“In the past, militaries, industry and even scientists have given little thought to the lasting impact of their activities, including risky waste left behind”, Laurence Smith, a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of “The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future” (Dutton Adult, 2010), told Live Science in an email. However, new research suggests the base could be exposed to the environment as early as 2090.
The northeast portal to Camp Century in 1964 shortly before the base was abandoned.
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On the other hand, a study from the University of Zurich explained that it would be tough and costly beginning to remove the waste now in Camp Century.
