In a 1961 report on American broadcaster CBS, TV legend Walter Cronkite visited the military base. His program filmed Camp Century’s massive ice tunnels being dug and showed U.S. army engineers relaxing in their underground, nuclear-powered barracks, reading and listening to records.
All that is now buried under thick layers of ice. Colgan said he and his team of researchers had been unable to find parts of Camp Century, such as its fuel depot, and feared disturbing it too much. “It’s cold, it’s deep, don’t poke it,” he said.
There are different ways Camp Century could contaminate the environment. One is if melting ice and snow carry toxic waste — such as the 200,000 liters of diesel fuel beneath the ice, according to Colgan — out into the ocean. Another is if the ice containing the base breaks off and forms an iceberg. Neither are likely anytime this century; while the latter would likely take thousands of years.
But the timeline shifts a little depending on how much the world warms in the coming decades. While there are different projections, a United Nations report published last October found the planet will heat up by 2.6 to 3.1 degrees Celsius this century, with no chance of limiting the temperature increase to the totemic 1.5 C target agreed in Paris in 2015.
“It’s a game of just a couple of degrees,” Colgan said. “2 or 3 C is the difference between Camp Century staying under ice or melting out.”
Climate change in microcosm
Camp Century itself was pivotal to scientists’ understanding of climate change. In the 1960s, scientists extracted an ice core there, a frozen soil sample that is still studied to this day for insights into climate patterns hundreds of thousands of years ago. The base remains a scientific “supersite,” said Colgan, who visits it annually along with many other climate researchers.
