Camp Century, a U.S. military base built
within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site
for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the
Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in 1967,
its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they
would be entombed forever by perpetual snowfall.
But climate change has warmed the Arctic more than any other region
on Earth, and a new study finds the portion of the ice sheet covering
Camp Century could start to melt by the end of the century. If the ice
melts, the camp’s infrastructure, as well as any remaining biological,
chemical and radioactive waste, could re-enter the environment and
potentially disrupt nearby ecosystems, according to the study’s authors.
Determining who is responsible for cleaning up the waste could also
lead to political disputes not considered before, according to the
study’s authors.
“Two generations ago, people were interring waste in different areas
of the world, and now climate change is modifying those sites,” said
William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University in
Toronto, Canada, and lead author of the new study. “It’s a new breed of
political challenge we have to think about.”
The new study was published today in
Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The assumption that any waste could be buried forever under ice is
unrealistic, according to James White, a climate scientist at the
University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not connected to the study.
“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,” White said.
“This stuff was going to come out anyway, but what climate change did
was press the gas pedal to the floor and say, ‘it’s going to come out a
lot faster than you thought.'”
During the Cold War, U.S. military attention shifted to the Arctic —
the shortest route between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. In
April 1951, the U.S. and Denmark agreed to defend Greenland, a Danish
territory, from Soviet attack, and the U.S. built several air bases in
Greenland that year.
In 1959, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century 200
kilometers (125 miles) inland from the Greenland coast. Encased
completely within the ice sheet, Camp Century became known as the “city
under the ice.”
The camp’s official purpose was to test construction techniques in
the Arctic and conduct scientific research. While in operation, the camp
housed 85 to 200 soldiers and was powered by a nuclear reactor.
Scientists at Camp Century took ice core samples providing climate data
still cited in research today, Colgan said.
The camp also provided proof of concept for a top secret program to
test the feasibility of building nuclear missile launch sites close
enough to reach the Soviet Union. While never built, a larger planned
camp based on the concept of Camp Century would have housed a
4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) long tunnel system underneath the ice,
capable of deploying up to 600 nuclear missiles.
Although the camp was built with Denmark’s approval, the missile
launch program, known as Project Iceworm, was kept secret from the
Danish government. Several years after the camp became operational,
Project Iceworm was rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the camp
was decommissioned. The Army Corps of Engineers removed the nuclear
reaction chamber but left the camp’s infrastructure and all other waste
behind, assuming the ice sheet would secure them forever. In the decades
since, falling snow has buried the camp roughly 35 meters (115 feet)
further underneath the ice.
In the new study, Colgan and his team took an inventory of the wastes
at Camp Century and ran climate model simulations to determine whether
the waste will stay put in a warming Arctic. The team analyzed
historical U.S. army engineering documents to determine where and how
deep the wastes were buried and how much the ice cap had moved since the
1950s.
“Looking at the data, we can see right where it’s buried,” says Mike
MacFerrin, a CIRES researcher who is co-author on the paper. MacFerrin
analyzed ground-penetrating radar from NASA’s Operation IceBridge
aircraft to pinpoint the camp’s current location and depth. “The radar
shows smooth layers of snow and ice until reaching the camp. Then the
signal gets messy. We don’t yet have enough detail to map exactly what
all is down there, but the outline is clear.”
The team found the waste at Camp Century covers 55 hectares (136
acres), roughly the size of 100 football fields. They estimate the site
contains 200,000 liters (53,000 gallons) of diesel fuel, enough for a
car to circle the globe 80 times. Based on building materials used in
the Arctic at the time, the authors speculate the site contains
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pollutants toxic to human health. They
also estimate the site has 240,000 liters (63,000 gallons) of waste
water, including sewage, along with an unknown amount of radioactive
coolant from the nuclear generator.
Looking at existing business-as-usual climate projections, the team
determined the wastes would not remain encased in ice forever, as was
assumed by both the U.S. and Denmark when the camp was abandoned.
Instead, they could melt and re-enter the environment.
“When we looked at the climate simulations, they suggested that
rather than perpetual snowfall, it seems that as early as 2090, the site
could transition from net snowfall to net melt,” Colgan said. “Once the
site transitions from net snowfall to net melt, it’s only a matter of
time before the wastes melt out; it becomes irreversible.”
Camp Century’s waste presents a significant environmental hazard,
according to the study’s authors. When the ice melts, pollutants could
be transported to the ocean, where they could disrupt marine ecosystems,
Colgan said.
Based on ice sheet observations near Camp Century but at lower
elevations, the camp’s waste could be exposed sooner than the study’s
models predict, said Jennifer Mercer, a cryospheric scientist with the
National Science Foundation who specializes in operations on the
Greenland Ice Sheet and who was not connected to the study.
The study does not advocate for starting remediation activities at
Camp Century now. The waste is buried tens of meters below the ice, and
any cleanup activities would be costly and technically challenging,
Colgan said.
“It really becomes a situation of waiting until the ice sheet has
melted down to almost expose the wastes that anyone should advocate for
site remediation,” he said.
But the new study does raise questions about who is responsible for
cleaning up the waste when it is exposed. International law is clear
about responsibility for preventing future hazardous waste, but
ambiguous about who is liable for waste already discarded, said Jessica
Green, a political scientist specializing in international environmental
law at New York University who was not connected to the study. Although
Camp Century was a U.S. base, it is on Danish soil, and although
Greenland is a Danish territory, it is now self-governing, she said.
The implications of climate change on politically ambiguous abandoned
wastes have not been considered before, according to the study’s
authors.
“The study identifies a big hole in the extant set of laws and rules
we have to deal with environmental problems globally,” Green said.
