Climate change could remobilize abandoned hazardous¹ waste thought to be buried forever beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, new research finds. 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 deploying² nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure³ 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 ecosystems⁴, 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 interring⁵ waste in different areas of the world, and now climate change is modifying those sites," said William Colgan, a climate and glacier⁶ scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder⁷, Colorado, 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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