In a 1961 report on American broadcaster CBS, TV legend Walter Cronkite visited the army base. His program filmed Camp Century’s huge ice tunnels being dug and confirmed U.S. military engineers stress-free of their underground, nuclear-powered barracks, studying and listening to data.
All that’s now buried below thick layers of ice. Colgan mentioned he and his crew of researchers had been unable to seek out elements of Camp Century, corresponding to its gasoline depot, and feared disturbing it an excessive amount of. “It’s chilly, it’s deep, don’t poke it,” he mentioned.
There are other ways Camp Century might contaminate the setting. One is that if melting ice and snow carry poisonous waste — such because the 200,000 liters of diesel gasoline beneath the ice, in response to Colgan — out into the ocean. Another is that if the ice containing the bottom breaks off and types an iceberg. Neither are possible anytime this century; whereas the latter would possible take hundreds of years.
But the timeline shifts somewhat relying on how a lot the world warms within the coming many years. While there are totally different projections, a United Nations report revealed final October discovered the planet will warmth up by 2.6 to three.1 levels Celsius this century, with no likelihood of limiting the temperature enhance to the totemic 1.5 C goal agreed in Paris in 2015.
“It’s a sport of simply a few levels,” Colgan mentioned. “2 or 3 C is the distinction between Camp Century staying below ice or melting out.”
Climate change in microcosm
Camp Century itself was pivotal to scientists’ understanding of local weather change. In the Nineteen Sixties, scientists extracted an ice core there, a frozen soil pattern that’s nonetheless studied to at the present time for insights into local weather patterns a whole bunch of hundreds of years in the past. The base stays a scientific “supersite,” mentioned Colgan, who visits it yearly together with many different local weather researchers.