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."
[...] The climate computer models say the camp could be uncovered by the end of this century.
Now, that's a worst-case scenario, based on an assumption that the world's governments won't do much to further reduce greenhouse gases that cause warming. But other things are happening that could spread that waste sooner.
Source: NPR
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @02:54PM
Just wait till you hear the most worstest case!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @03:24PM
But what if there will be an even moster worstest case?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @05:06PM
Better get Captain Planet on the horn!