Camp Century sounds like a horror movie setting, but the military base deep beneath Greenland’s ice sheet was real, home to up to 200 men and powered by a portable nuclear reactor as they experimented with the ability to launch nukes from secret bases. And when it was decommissioned in 1969, they just left everything there because, come on, it’s not like Greenland’s ice sheet was going to melt any time soon, right? Yeah, uh, so that was a mistake.
A new study has found that Camp Century, which is basically a giant radioactive garbage dump the size of 100 football fields, is going to be uncovered by climate change. And then it’s probably going to collapse into the ocean, you know, because the ocean doesn’t have enough problems. This could happen as soon as 75 years from now, assuming that we stick to our plan as a species for just burning every pebble of coal and drop of oil we can find.
This isn’t just an environmental issue, although sixty-year-old radioactive poop slipping into the ocean is pretty bad. This base was built thanks to a treaty between Denmark and the U.S., and Denmark can, quite reasonably, demand the U.S. come clean up its giant thawing garbage dump. So that might be a fun argument we’ll have, while we’re trying to figure out saving polar bears from a fate worse than death.
(Via Gizmodo)
