Is an environmental disaster looming in the Arctic?

I think you may find this is a story to be concerned about

It seems this may be the case but not immediately. An abandoned 1950s US (nuclear powered) military camp is being progressively exposed though ice from Greenland’s receding icecap.

This camp’s tunnels had a total length of 3,000 metres (1.9 mi), and these tunnels also contained a hospital, a shop, a theater and a church.

It seems as the ice caps melt the camp, including it’s portable nuclear reactor, will become progressively exposed sometime late this century, if not sooner. The camp is relic of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. For more information I will quote an extract from a wider article relating to the subject cited further below.

Quote:

“…At the height of the cold war, as the US and the USSR were engaged in a terrifying standoff over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the US army was considering the construction of a vast subterranean extension of Camp Century…” Readers may see original footage of the Camp being constructed here.

“…A system of about 4,000 kilometres of icy underground tunnels and chambers extending over an area around three times the size of Denmark were to have housed 600 ballistic missiles in clusters six kilometres apart, trained on Moscow and its satellites.

Eventually the engineers realised Iceworm would not work. The constantly moving ice was too unstable and would have deformed and perhaps even collapsed the tunnels.

From 1964 Camp Century was used only intermittently, and three years later it was abandoned altogether, the departing soldiers taking the reaction chamber of the nuclear generator with them.

They left the rest of the camp’s infrastructure – and its biological, chemical and radioactive waste – where it was, on the assumption it would be “preserved for eternity” by the perpetually accumulating snow and ice.

Thus far their assumption has proven correct. Up to 12 metres deep at the time it was abandoned, the ice covering Camp Century has since thickened to around 35 metres and will continue to deepen for a while yet.

Climate change, however, looks certain to reverse that process, Colgan and his six-strong team from Canadian, US and European universities said in their report, which was published last month in Geophysical Research Letters…”

The wider article

Additional media article:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/camp-century-global-warming/