The Huffington Post revived a story that caught media attention last year about a Cold War-era nuclear facility in the Arctic under potential threat from global warming.
For inexplicable reasons, HuffPo resurrected a story initially reported by The Guardian in 2016 that a now defunct subterranean base in Greenland called Camp Century could be exposed by melting ice caps.
HuffPo adds that the base’s exposure “will release an abundance of PCBs as well as other physical, chemical, biological and radiological wastes (including thousands of barrels of diesel) that could eventually be swept to Canada” through ocean currents.
The only new information that HuffPo adds is from an April report by the Arctic Council, which the left-leaning paper claims “significantly increased the projections of how fast global sea-levels will rise, meaning that ice could melt at Camp Century sooner than projected.”
The so-called “city under the ice” was part of a U.S. plan to have a nuclear missile launch site under the ice. Although it was abandoned in 1967, it still contains leftover nuclear waste and other chemicals.
U.S. military officials thought that the base would be “preserved for eternity,” according to a 2016 study on the matter. Yet the study suggested man-made global warming would unearth the site “within decades,” The Guardian reported last year.
“They thought it would never be exposed,” William Colgan, a glacier scientist at York University, told The Guardian at the time.
“Back then, in the 60s, the term global warming had not even been coined,” Colgan said. “But the climate is changing, and the question now is whether what’s down there is going to stay down there.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation looked into the Guardian’s claims last year.
What Colgan’s study found is that, under the worst possible global warming scenario, the “ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is plausible within the next 75 years.”
In other words, by 2090 the northern portion of Greenland’s ice sheet Camp Century sits under will lose more ice than it gains in snowfall every year. After that, the base may slowly become exposed over the following 88 years.
Ice accumulation over Camp Century has actually increased in recent decades. In 1959, Camp Century was only 26 feet deep, but by 2016 the base was buried under nearly 90 feet of ice.
HuffPo said that the run-off from the ice sheet’s net melt — in 2090 — “could carry chemical waste into the sea.”
That’s hardly an impending emergency.
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