Greenland ice exposes Cold War waste

COPENHAGEN: A snow-covered former US army base in Greenland -- dubbed "a city under ice" -- could leak pollutants into the environment as the climate changes, raising difficult questions over who is responsible for a clean-up.

In 1959, US army engineers began constructing a futuristic project in northwestern Greenland that might as well have been lifted from a Cold War spy movie. A network of tunnels under the snow contained everything from research facilities to a hospital, a cinema and a church -- all powered by a small, portable nuclear reactor.

The pollutants left behind include PCBs used in building supplies, tanks of raw sewage and low-level radioactive coolant used in the nuclear reactor that once stood there.

"When the waste was deposited there nobody thought it would get out again," William Colgan, an assistant professor in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University in Canada, told AFP.

But a study led by Colgan, published in August in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that higher temperatures could eventually result in toxic waste from the base being released into the environment.

"Neither the US or Denmark has done anything wrong per se, but the world has changed," he said. Accommodating up to 200 soldiers, "Camp Century" was officially built to provide a laboratory for Arctic research projects, but it was also home to a secret US effort to deploy nuclear missiles.

Code-named "Project Iceworm", that part of the operation was never mentioned in the treaty between the US and Denmark, once the colonial master of Greenland, a territory that is now largely self-governing.

But the spectacular project -- which even included a test railway under the snow -- was never fully realised.

Three years later scientists found that the glacier was shifting much faster than previously thought, threatening to crush the tunnels, and the base was abandoned in 1967.