Melting Greenland ice could expose Cold War waste

A snow-covered former US army base in Greenland - dubbed "a city under ice" - could leak pollutants into the environment as the climate changes, raising difficult questions over who is responsible for a clean-up.

Camp Century in Greenland, Google Maps

In 1959, US army engineers began constructing a futuristic project in northwestern Greenland that might as well have been lifted from a Cold War spy movie.

Camp Century was a network of tunnels under the snow that contained everything from research facilities to a hospital, a cinema and a church - all powered by a small, portable nuclear reactor.

Project Iceworm

Accommodating up to 200 soldiers, the camp was officially built to provide a laboratory for Arctic research projects, but it was also home to a secret US effort to deploy nuclear missiles.

Archive photo of an overhead view of Camp Century. Photo: US Army

Project Iceworm construction, photo via Frank J. Leskovitz

Project Iceworm construction, photo via Frank J. Leskovitz

The construction was code-named Project Iceworm. It even included a test railway under the snow. But the project was never fully realised.

The glacier shifted much faster than expected, threatening to crush the tunnels, and the base was abandoned in 1967.

Assuming the site would remain frozen in perpetuity, the US army removed the nuclear reactor but allowed waste - equivalent to the mass of 30 Airbus A320 airplanes - to be entombed under the snow.

Half a century later that decision is being questioned as temperatures in the Arctic rise at a higher pace than in the rest of the world.

Warmer climate and pollutants

The pollutants left behind include PCBs used in building supplies, tanks of raw sewage and low-level radioactive coolant used in the nuclear reactor that once stood there.

"When the waste was deposited there nobody thought it would get out again," William Colgan, an assistant professor in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University in Canada, told AFP.

But a study led by Colgan, published in August 2016 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that higher temperatures will result in toxic waste from the base being released into the environment.

"Neither the US or Denmark has done anything wrong per se, but the world has changed," he said.

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