More than half a century ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers carved a secret Cold War missile base at Camp Century, beneath more than 20 feet of an ice sheet in northwestern Greenland. The project was abandoned after less than a decade, including entire buildings, a railroad, sewage, toxic and even some radioactive waste.

The idea was that perpetual snow would permanently entomb all of it, but now NASA and others say current trends could instead bring the base to the surface and let loose some of that toxic waste into the environment even sooner.

NASA Earth Observatory

Deeper red areas signify places where the ice surface is likely to drop by three or more meters (10 feet) per year. Blue areas indicate slight net gains in ice cover; white indicates no change.

NASA's Earth Observatory published a pair of maps today showing how the ice around and above Camp Century could begin to recede by around 2090. If the area of the base ever found itself in the deep red on the map, that means it would only take a few years for it to be exposed.

While this could make for a cool bit of post-modern Cold War archaeology, a 2016 paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters raises concern that the waste buried with and deeper below the base could soon be re-mobilized by all the melting happening now and  in the future on Greenland's ice sheets.

In fact, meltwater could carry a significant amount of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) deeper into the ice and downhill towards the ocean well before surface melting even begins at the site.

Meltwater on a Greenland glacial ice sheet. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

"PCBs are the most consequential waste at Camp Century," the study reads.

The Camp Century site contains 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 6.3 million gallons of sewage and other wastewater and "nontrivial" quantities of PCBs and low-level radioactive waste from the mobile nuclear reactor that powered the base.

The estimates for the base's thawing are based on current trends, which scientists say could still be slowed down with drastic action, but so far, the outlook for Greenland hasn't been great, and that's not great news for the rest of the planet either.
