It seems our world is replete with old military bases, some of which have been abandoned without being cleaned up. I am not talking about going through these bases with a broom. What I am talking about is far more serious. I just read a story about an abandoned U.S. underground base in Greenland. The base was constructed with the permission of Denmark which had control over Greenland at the time. Scientists in Canada say the ice sheet which covers the base will be gone by the next century and that all the radioactive waste on the base and the myriad of toxic chemicals will be exposed and flow into the water and will become a very serious hazard to all those areas the water flows by. It seems the base was constructed during the beginning of the Cold War. The base was built under 60 meters of ice and of course that ice is covered with snow. The base was known as Camp Century. It is believed when the base was abandoned in the late 1960s everything was just left there. A layout of the camp is below it comes from the US Army Corps of Engineers and was posted on Wikipedia.

Isn’t it amazing how this could have existed and almost no one knew anything about it? It reminds me about my time in the US Army where I was on a missile base in the early 1960s. That was when I found out there were missiles under some towns which we never would have suspected. Climate change it seems is going to be responsible for unearthing any bases which were buried under the ice and we could be in for a very big surprise.

So why did we build that base under the Greenland ice sheet? We built it so we could launch medium range nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union if war broke out. The project name for this was Project Iceworm. According to Wikipedia Camp Century only lasted about 6 years but other sources on the Internet claim it was around long before the 1960s. The American Thule Air Base in Greenland was set up in 1951 and some claim this was when work was started on Camp Century. It was said the US government told the Danish government the purpose of the camp was to test and improve a semi-mobile nuclear reactor and do experiments on the icecap. If this is true, Denmark was sorely misled if the camp was really used for missile defense.

It was said the glacier was moving far faster than the engineers expected and it was felt it would destroy any tunnels which were dug and make the base unsuitable for a missile complex. Whether there were actually missiles there or not it does seem there was a lot of bad stuff left behind which could hurt us. The question is will anything be done by us to protect future generations form this stuff or will we say it is not our problem and dump in into the lap of Greenland or Denmark? I hope not, we should own up to the fact it was an American base and do the right thing.

As hard as this is to believe, the US wanted to cover 52,000 square miles with the launch complex and this is three times the size of Denmark. Clusters of missile centers were to be placed about 4 miles apart with everything buried under the ice. When the army abandoned the base the reason it gave for leaving everything there was that it would be buried under the ice forever. Climate change, which many say does not exist is eroding ice on much of this planet and Greenland will not be an exception. It is being said the waste at the camp is composed of biological, chemical and radioactive waste.