More Unforeseen Consequences Of Climate Change

Following up on my previous post re climate change, it is becoming more and more apparent that there are huge unforeseen consequences of global warming that go way beyond what scientist are already anticipating. And here is one particularly frightening example. During the height of the Cold War in 1959, the US military started looking for possible nuclear missile launch sites in the Arctic. One of those locations was in the northwest of Greenland where the US built a base called Camp Century. The base was closed down in 1969 and the military buried fuel and low-level radioactive coolant deep into the Greenland glacier, where, they thought, it would be entombed forever in ice. Of course, as the ice sheet in Greenland melts away, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the hazardous chemical, biological, and radioactive material will eventually be released into the neighboring environment. As of now, the material is still over buried by over 100 feet of ice. But at some point in the future, as the ice continues to melt, an expensive remediation process is going to have to occur or we will have another disaster on our hands. Beyond the climate change issue, this is yet another example of the trail of pollution that the US military leaves behind. There are 114 Superfund sites in US that are military installations, nearly 10% of the entire total, and the Pentagon is dealing with 9,000 contaminated sites in just the US alone. As the situation in Greenland shows, that trail of pollution stretches around the entire globe.