Yikes. Greenland's melting ice and the toxic waste (including nuclear) left by a U.S. military base
What to do about toxic waste buried in Greenland's rapidly melting ice caps
A new study shows that a US military base expected to be encased by ice and snow forever is now dangerously close to being exposed.
Climate change is bringing a lot of first-time environmental challenges, as well as many unprecedented political challenges.
And one such climate change challenge could be particularly political.
Greenland's ice sheet is melting at a rapid pace. According to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, this significant snow and ice loss could cause buried toxic waste to resurface unexpectedly.
Camp Century was a US military base built on and under the Greenland ice sheet in 1959 to test nuclear missiles during the height of the cold war. But the United States decommissioned the military base in 1967, leaving behind the various waste from a nuclear reactor such as gasoline, sewage, and radioactive coolant. The US, along with Denmark who controlled Greenland at the time, did not think much of the buried waste, assuming continual snowfall would only bury the remnants deeper.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0805/What-to-do-about-toxic-waste-buried-in-Greenland-s-rapidly-melting-ice-caps
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