Melting ice sheet could release frozen Cold War-era waste

[bananas]

Source: Phys.org

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.

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Read more: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-ice-sheet-frozen-cold-war-era.html

[bananas]

1. Melting Ice Is Revealing a Old Cold War Base And its toxic waste.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a22196/melting-ice-reveals-camp-century-waste-greenland/

Melting Ice Is Revealing a Old Cold War Base
And its toxic waste.

By David Grossman
Aug 4, 2016

Melting is slowly but surely exposing the waste of a forgotten, frozen Cold War base.

At the peak of the Cold War in 1960, the U.S. government decided that it needed to go really, really cold and construct a subsurface base in Greenland. The North Pole was the quickest route from America to the Soviet Union, and having medium-range missiles in the region seemed liked a good idea.

Named Camp Century due to the fact that it was 100 miles from the polar ice cap, the base proved to be more of a technical achievement than strategic necessity. The project was canceled six years later in part because the ice it was built on was moving. Abandoning the camp, the government just assumed that perpetual snowfall would cover up the site and freeze it up for the foreseeable course of human history.

Now, in a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, it's possible to see just how wrong they were. "Since the 1960s," writes William Colgan, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering at York University, "the scientific community has recognized the Greenland Ice Sheet to be more sensitive to climate forcing than previously thought." By 2025, there's a 50 percent chance that the ice sheet that covers 80 percent of Greenland will no longer have dry snow at higher elevations.

The real problem is all the waste left behind. A complex military structure (there's an old Army paper about its construction, which is fascinating) powered first by a portable nuclear reactor and later by diesel, Camp Century contained weaponry and a complex set of tunnels. An old Army documentary about the achievement pronounced, "on top of Greenland today, a city is buried."

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[jtuck004]

3. I wonder what's been evolving under there? n/t

Old bio experiments...



'Cause that might be all you can do.

[bananas]

2. The paper is open-access

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL069688/full

The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate

Authors William Colgan, Horst Machguth, Mike MacFerrin, Jeff D. Colgan, Dirk van As, Joseph A. MacGregor

First published: 4 August 2016
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069688

Abstract

In 1959 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century beneath the surface of the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet. There they studied the feasibility of deploying ballistic missiles within the ice sheet. The base and its wastes were abandoned with minimal decommissioning in 1967, under the assumption they would be preserved for eternity by perpetually accumulating snowfall. Here we show that a transition in ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is plausible within the next 75?years, under a business-as-usual anthropogenic emissions scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5). Net ablation would guarantee the eventual remobilization of physical, chemical, biological, and radiological wastes abandoned at the site. While Camp Century and four other contemporaneous ice sheet bases were legally established under a Danish-U.S. treaty, the potential remobilization of their abandoned wastes, previously regarded as sequestered, represents an entirely new pathway of political dispute resulting from climate change.

<snip>

[BumRushDaShow]

4. "Determining who is responsible for cleaning up the waste"

If it was a U.S. base then why are they even asking the question? We buried it, we clean it!

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.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-ice-sheet-frozen-cold-war-era.html#jCp

If I am not mistaken, a U.S. base in any country of the world is considered "U.S. territory"!

[HereSince1628]

5. But, probably not considered US territory once they are closed

In an era in which politicians from all sides are looking to off-load obligations, it's an open question as to whether the clean-up would be willingly sponsored by the US. It seems rather likely that the military would be reluctant to divert re$ource$ from their budgets to do this.

[BumRushDaShow]

7. If we used the site to also store waste from other countries

(which seems like a good bet) then they can contribute. But otherwise, IMHO, it's our crap and it will ultimately fall on us (as a deep pocket in the world). It would probably take decades to do and won't be done all at once, which mitigates the cost. The issue is "when"..... so expect the can to be kicked down the road a long way.

[HereSince1628]

8. Yes, it's our crap, buried as refuse in a foreign country.

I don't disagree that the US has a moral obligation to deal with this stuff.

I doubt that Greenland has the resources to do an environmental clean-up of rocket fuel. Clean-up of such things has been difficult in the temperate climate of the US.

They're going to need technical and financial help, but they're going to have to identify what gets done by who and who helps pay for it.

That said, I also have no doubt that there will be people in the US government that don't want to pay for it.

[BumRushDaShow]

9. Can't argue with that!!

[cstanleytech]

11. Well you can count me as one of the one who doesnt want to pay for it then.

I am not saying we shouldnt though just that I really dont want to but if we gotta we gotta assuming of course Greenland even asks us to, they might very well decide to do it on their own and they probably could afford it if it was a gradual effort.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Oh, jeez. What a bunch of geniuses. We were and are number one.

How shockingly crude and primitive and short-sighted that really, really was.

[center]



[/center]
W.C. Fields and family saw some beautiful grass, and some statues, decided it was perfect for a picnic, and drove their car over, spread papers all over the ground, dragged out their picnic hamper while the papers blew around and away, and they scattered their stuff around until someone came out to inform them they were destroying someone's yard.

Sounds so similar to this situation, but not as shocking and horrid, of course.

[HereSince1628]

10. The USSR dumped spent nuclear reactors and 'hot' components into the Kara Sea.

for decades.

Their geniuses were also thinking that part of the Arctic was never going to support life or be of better economic service.