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posted by janrinok on Monday August 08 2016, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-gets-the-bill? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday August 09 2016, @08:03AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday August 09 2016, @08:03AM (#385682) Journal

    Thank you for clarifying. Now that we agree that "climate change acceptance" means [...]

    I don't, of course, speak for the other posters.

    [...] "more ice was lost between 2007 and 2011 than between 1900 and 1983", something which was apparently not established until this paper was published [...]

    That paragraph summarises other people's work, not their own.

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