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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: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday August 08 2016, @04:45PM
Not quite sure what you're getting at about moving snow. To keep the ceiling from collapsing?
The somewhat brief Wikipedia article says
Within three years after it was excavated, ice core samples taken by geologists working at Camp Century demonstrated that the glacier was moving much faster than anticipated and would destroy the tunnels and planned launch stations in about two years. The facility was evacuated in 1965, and the nuclear generator removed. Project Iceworm was canceled, and Camp Century closed in 1966.
[...]
Although the Greenland icecap appears, on its surface, to be hard and immobile, snow and ice are viscoelastic materials, which slowly deform over time, depending on temperature and density. Despite its seeming stability, the icecap is, in fact, in constant, slow movement, spreading outward from the center. This spreading movement, over the course of a year, causes tunnels and trenches to narrow, as their walls deform and bulge, eventually leading to a collapse of the ceiling. By mid-1962 the ceiling of the reactor room within Camp Century had dropped and had to be lifted 5 feet (1.5 m).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday August 08 2016, @05:05PM
OK interesting I had googled up and mostly looked at
http://gombessa.tripod.com/scienceleadstheway/id9.html [tripod.com]
Maintaining the tunnels at Camp Century required time-consuming and laborious trimming and removal of more than 120 tons of snow and ice each month.
And they only had 200 people there at absolute peak, usually less. And there's a note early in the article about four feet per year of snow.
I suppose the exact mechanism doesn't matter as much as regardless of the story behind it, apparently snow is not an ideal building material. My impression was the annoyance scaled horizontally so if they built what amounts to a buried skyscraper it would be somewhat less annoying. But either way...
Also I suppose no glacier means you could build a facility there again, soon.
Then I found Project Iceworm and looks like I have google reading for hours if not days. Interesting stuff.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday August 08 2016, @06:12PM
You think that's interesting, you should check out the British plan to build aircraft carriers out of ice [wikipedia.org] back in WWII :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @12:57AM
I can tell you that the sawdust DOES reinforce the ice significantly. However you really do need even sized sawdust boiled into a thick soup to have it come out uniform or maximize strength.
The sad part is water temperatures have risen so much that constructing such hulls would not make sense even in the far polar regions, since short of a massive wind array, nuclear reactor, or huge quantities of dense liquid fuels (ideally low viscosity unless you want to have to waste energy heating the fuel as well as cooling the hull) it would be completely economically and logistically infeasible to keep such a vessel maintained and fueled at this point in time due to both the ambient and unknown variability of temperatures in those regions today (see the permafrost melt in Siberia for an example of what those ships would have to contend with!)
That said: You might be able to use this technique for special purpose/disposable hulls if you had a method to rapidly fabricate the outer cooling loop and a thin inner hull and either outer hull or mold to fill and freeze the structural ice with.