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 “Now here this..all control rods withdrawn,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.”
