Wednesday November 27, 2024
Created in 1959, in the midst of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, Camp Century, a gigantic American military base, was built in Greenland, a strategic territory located in the Arctic. Abandoned in 1967 and buried under the ice, it was rediscovered fifty-seven years later by NASA, which was flying over the territory.
A discovery that takes us back to a now distant era, that of the Cold War. While flying over Greenland, NASA has just rediscovered Camp Century, a former American military base built in 1959, in the midst of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Abandoned in 1967, it was buried under more than 30 meters of ice. But the melting of the ice due to global warming has caused it to resurface.
Read also: He photographs the remains of the Cold War
Greenland, a strategic territory
It was a team of NASA researchers, led by Alex Gardner from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who detected the outlines of a “real underground city”details the media specializing in digital Lemon squeezer. This military base was imagined in the middle of the Cold War by the Pentagon, when tensions were at their peak between the United States and the USSR. It is the US Army Corps of Engineers who will build it from scratch in an extremely strategic territory, halfway between the two countries.
“Officially, the objective was to establish Arctic research laboratories”reminds Le Figaro. But Camp Century was part of a completely different project, called “Iceworm”, intended to store 600 ballistic missiles within firing range of the USSR in a network of galleries. In addition to this, through their presence in Greenland, the Americans also sought to exploit the Arctic’s abundant natural resources, such as oil and gas.
The pinnacle of American military civil engineering
This military base, built in extreme climatic conditions, embodies the pinnacle of American military civil engineering of the time. In this area of the globe, temperatures can drop as low as -57°C and winds exceed 193 km/h. “The teams drilled tunnels into the ice using a revolutionary technique called “cut-and-cover”, creating a gigantic network of galleries extending over 3 km”tell Lemon squeezer. The structures are maintained at a constant temperature thanks to a complex refrigeration system preventing the walls from melting.
In total, the project cost $8 million at the time, or more than $80 million today. Camp Century was built to house 200 soldiers. Inside, there are dormitories, laboratories, a hospital, a chapel, “and even a cinema”lance Lemon squeezer, “all powered by a portable PM-2A nuclear reactor, a world first in the Arctic”.
Radioactive waste will resurface
But the site, abandoned in 1967, never really lived. “Despite the scale of the project, ‘Iceworm’ remained secret until 1997, when the Danish Foreign Policy Institute published a report, at the request of parliament, concerning the history of nuclear weapons in Greenland.”retrace Le Figaro. As a reminder, Greenland was a former Danish colony and has been, since 1979, an autonomous territory dependent on Denmark.
For decades, snow accumulated and gradually buried this base. But a potential environmental catastrophe could occur because of global warming. “The rediscovery of Camp Century goes hand in hand with quite worrying environmental issues. The gradual melting of the Greenland ice sheet could one day expose these installations and their toxic waste, constituting a potential threat to the already severely weakened Arctic ecosystem.alert Lemon squeezer.
Read also: Greenland has started to melt, but will it disappear completely?
Ice melting accelerates in Greenland
Indeed, there is a risk today of seeing the 240,000 liters of wastewater and 200,000 liters of fuel left behind by the American military dumped into the ocean. And that’s without counting the radioactive residues linked to the mobile nuclear reactor which also remained at the dock. A scenario that was not foreseen at the time of its construction in 1959. “Its architects hoped that it would rest in the cryosphere for eternity”says in a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters William Colgan, glaciologist at the Canadian University of York, cited by Le Figaro.
In 2019, a study published in the journal ofUnited States National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) revealed in particular “a seven-fold acceleration in the melting of Greenland’s ice”underlines the media National Geographicwith 40 billion tonnes of ice lost per year in the 1970s compared to 280 billion tonnes per year in the 2010s.
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