Nuclear wasteMelting ice sheet could release frozen cold war-era radioactive waste

Published 8 August 2016

Camp Century, a U.S. military base built within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959, was decommissioned in 1967, and 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 as portion of the ice sheet covering Camp Century melt, the camp’s infrastructure will become exposed, and any remaining biological, chemical, and radioactive waste could re-enter the environment.

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 a new study.  

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.”

Thenew study was published 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.’”

A “city under the ice”
U Colorado Boulder says that during the cold war, U.S. military attention shifted to the Arctic — the shortest route between the United States and the former Soviet Union. In April 1951, the United States and Denmark agreed to defend Greenland, a Danish territory, from Soviet attack, and the United States built several air bases in Greenland that year.