This team of of scientists and engineers are camped above an abandoned Cold War military
base that’s buried 30 meters below Greenland’s ice sheet.
William: “That is Delta storm condition.”
They’re part of a special climate monitoring program, because the underground base that
they’re studying, could eventually thaw out and unearth thousands of tons of toxic
waste.
“On the top of the world, below the surface of the giant ice cap, a city is buried.
This is the story of Camp Century.”
During the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. started paying close attention to Greenland.
To protect the island from creeping Soviet influence, the US and Denmark signed the 1951
Defense of Greenland Act.
“Today on the island of Greenland…..the United States Army has established an unprecedented
nuclear powered Arctic research center.”
Army personnel put the latest advances in polar construction to the test, building several
military bases out on the ice sheet... one of them was Camp Century.
“We finally picked this plateau, a smooth white plain of ice for as far as you could
see.
This was the closest to location to Thule our supply base, which would not be affected
by summer thaw."
William: “Researchers were doing a lot of very fundamental glacier and climate research.
Camp Century is probably best known for being home of the first deep ice core to the Greenland
ice sheet.
It's like nothing we have today.
It was just this phenomenal marriage of technology and innovation in the 1960s.”
They built an entire underground city, complete with housing, kitchens, lounges, a library,
scientific labs, communications center, supply rooms, a chapel, scientific labs, and even
a barber shop.
William: “And the whole camp, which could house up to 200 people on a year-round basis
was powered by a nuclear power plant.”
The US Atomic Energy Commission developed small, portable nuclear power reactors that
could be built in remote locations, and Camp Century was the perfect proving ground.
They flew over 400 tons of equipment to Greenland to build a PM-2A reactor, and they carefully
transported the materials to the base, where scientists then installed it to power the
polar camp.
“Now here this..all control rods withdrawn, PM2A went critical at 06 52 hours.”
Camp Century was presented to the world as a heroic conquest of the Arctic, in man’s
never ending pursuit for knowledge and scientific progress.
William: “They had Walter Cronkite up there doing news hour specials back in the '60s.
Everybody knew about it.
It was no secret.”
But, this scientific endeavor was actually part of a covert U.S. Army operation, codenamed
Project Iceworm.
In response to escalating Cold War tensions, the U.S. wanted to position 600 medium range
missiles with nuclear warheads underneath the Greenland ice sheet.
All was going according to plan, until engineers noticed the ice that surrounded the base...was
shifting faster than initially projected.
William: “The people who were working at Camp Century did not have an understanding
of climate change.
They didn't have solid records, global climate models, these big data sets that let you see
an overview of what's happening to earth's climate.”
The ice sheet started to destabilize the underground tunnels faster than scientists projected.
William: “When Camp Century was decommissioned, only the nuclear reactor was taken out for
destructive testing, and the rest of the camp was left in place, and they closed the doors
and left.
It was abandoned on the assumption that climate wouldn't change, and it would continue to
snow at Camp Century forever.
The perpetual snowfall would entomb all of the base infrastructure and eventually bury
it.”
But the climate has changed.
Temperatures have reached record highs in the Arctic and Greenland’s ice sheet is
melting at an unprecedented rate, which could turn Camp Century’s abandoned waste into
a major environmental risk.
So, a team of scientists, including William, went back to the site.
William: “In 2017, the government of Denmark, at the request of the government of Greenland,
started the Camp Century climate monitoring program.We set up a bunch of instruments that
are erected on the ice sheet surface, and then we drill in and we put probes into the
ice sheet.
It keeps a real-time data stream coming from the Camp Century site where we monitor a bunch
of things, mainly the temperature of the snow, the temperature of the ice, the air temperature.
That will help us model how the snow and ice at Camp Century is going to behave over the
next century.”
They also mapped the debris left behind using ice penetrating radar.
William: “The radar is perhaps the most time-consuming because you have to manually
tow it at a slow speed.
It sends out a pulse of energy that goes down into the ice, and then it reflects off different
things and comes back to a receiver.
It was 80 kilometers in total.
That's a lot of radar.”
They turned the radar profiles into a 3D map of the entire debris field.
William: “ At Camp Century, you get those horizontal lines of annual accumulation layers,
but then you also get these big pockets of chaos.
You can see the main tunnels.
You can see pieces of debris down to about the size of a vehicle, maybe even a fuel drum.
Our preliminary estimate is that we think the debris field is about 55 acres in size,
which is about 100 football fields, and we think it contains just over 9,000 metric tons
of debris.
We're very interested in how deep everything is and where it is so that when we go to do
our simulations of how much melt water that might be at the site over the next century
and how deep it is going to percolate into the ice sheet.
There is concern that if melt water starts interacting with the debris field, it could
mobilize some contaminants.”
Those contaminants include diesel fuel, nuclear waste like radioactive coolant water, and
other toxic chemicals from the camp’s buildings and general infrastructure.
And all of that is on track to seep into the environment.
William: “In the 1960s, the building codes were a little different.
So we know, for example, that the materials they were using at Camp Century were rich
in PCBs and other types of persistent contaminants.
And they still come out of the ground kicking.
They don't deteriorate at all.
We're at a fork in the road for Camp Century.
Under the “business as usual” climate, it looks likely that we will start to see
more melt than snowfall at Camp Century.
But if we stick with something like Paris Agreement, we can keep more snowfall that
melt beyond the end of the century.”
But this does raise questions about who is ultimately responsible for the clean up.
And that leads us into a geopolitical gray area.
Camp Century was a U.S. base on Greenland soil, which was governed by Denmark.
And currently, no party has taken responsibility for the abandoned base.
And International environmental law really hasn’t figured something like this out yet.
William: “It's really a microcosm of the multi-generational, even multinational implications
in climate change facing us now, and we have to be very aware of future projections, and
take action today to go on the high mitigation and low emissions route.”