Melting ice sheet could expose frozen Cold War-era hazardous waste
http://news.yorku.ca/2016/08/04/melting-ice-sheet-could-expose-frozen-cold-war-era-hazardous-waste/[font face=Serif][font size=5]Melting ice sheet could expose frozen Cold War-era hazardous waste[/font]
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TORONTO, Aug. 4, 2016 Climate change is threatening to expose hazardous waste at an abandoned camp thought to be buried forever in the Greenland Ice Sheet, new research out of York University has found.
Camp Century, a United States military base built within the Greenland ice sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be entombed forever by perpetual snowfall.
Two generations ago, people were interring waste in different areas of the world, and now climate change is modifying those sites, said William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York U and lead author of the new study. Its a new breed of climate change challenge we have to think about.
The
study was published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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