Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Boy, were they wrong.

AND THEN WHAT?

Anthropogenic climate change, that’s what.

Climate change is happening, whether we like it or not. More to the point, climate change is happening, whether we believe it or not. Science doesn’t care what we believe.

Neither does the planet, whose warming trend is bringing us extreme weather, vicious storms, devastating wildfires, rising seas, spreading deserts, deadlier (and more prolific) diseases, and diminishing reserves of vital resources. It’s here. It’s worldwide. It’s man-made. And it’s just going to get worse.

No region is more sensitive to climate change than the Arctic. This is not new information—scientists first recognized the Arctic’s susceptibility to warming in the nineteenth century. The reason for this is a phenomenon known as albedo feedback, in which an initial warming sets in motion a chain reaction that significantly amplifies the rate of warming. Here’s how it works: Most of the Arctic is covered in snow and ice, which is, you know, white. If you remember fifth-grade science class, you know that white surfaces reflect sunlight (and dark surfaces absorb it). “Albedo” is actually a scientific measure of how white (or reflective) a surface is. Snow and ice have an albedo as high as (or higher than) 80 percent, meaning that 80 percent of the sun’s energy hitting the surface is reflected back into space. Ocean water, on the other hand, tends to be a much darker color (blue, green, brown), and has an albedo of less than 10 percent. Barely any energy gets sent back to where it came from.

As the Earth gets warmer, more of the Arctic ice melts. And this is of course problematic for those who live on coastlines, where a small increase in sea level could be catastrophic. But even if you live in Nebraska, or Germany, or the Himalayas, melting Arctic ice is your problem too. Melted ice and snow turns into ocean water. Dark ocean water. Instead of reflecting solar energy, it absorbs it, warming the planet even further.

Melting ice causes dark water. Dark water causes more warming, More warming brings more melting. More melting brings more dark water. The albedo feedback. It’s coming for all of us.

And this is not coming from tree-hugging, granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing Berkeley liberals. It’s coming from the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, who are both watching this trend with increased concern. The Pentagon and IC view the melting Arctic as an economic and security issue. The reason: The Arctic region is the largest unexplored trove of petroleum resources remaining on Earth—ninety billion barrels of oil, seventeen hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and forty-four billion barrels of liquid natural gas. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, climate change “will raise the risk of increased competition between Arctic and non-Arctic nations over access to sea routes and resources.”

Two of those Arctic nations: the United States and Russia.

Yikes.

And if we all somehow survive the U.S./Russian oil rush to the North Pole (and, you know, all the other problems caused by a warming planet), climate change has another surprise in store for us. The Greenland icecap is receding, and threatening to uncover the top-secret U.S. government Cold War nuclear project that was assumed to be buried for all eternity.

We hoped it was gone forever. We hoped no one would ever know it was there. For decades we had assumed this covert facility would be covered by ice and snow until the end of time.

The planet seems to have other ideas.

A 2016 study published in the Geophysical Research Letters argued that within the next seventy-five years, the ice and snow that covers Camp Century will begin to melt faster than it is replaced. Once this happens, it will be only a matter of time before the camp is reintroduced to the public.

But that’s not all that will be exposed to the world. When Project Iceworm was abandoned, the U.S. government assumed that the Greenland Ice Sheet would provide the cover (pun intended) not just for their secret facility, but also for all of its physical, chemical, biological, and radioactive waste.

Physical waste (like building material and railroad remnants), chemical waste (thousands of gallons of diesel fuel and PCBs—which we will talk about in a moment), biological waste (gross), and radiological waste (coolant for the reactor) are now likely buried about 120 feet down into the ice—with some liquid wastes perhaps even farther down, maybe as deep as 200 feet.

That sounds deep, but it’s not. Because of the rapidity in which climate change is altering the environment, it might only hold out for another couple of decades. And it could happen sooner if the pace of climate change amps up even more.

And regardless of when the actual melting of all the ice on the surface occurs, the waste left over from Century/Iceworm could be swept into the sea by some of the surface ice melting and seeping down through the ice sheet. Once it does, the water can pick up and wash away waste through small crevasses and channels in the solid ice and out into the open ocean. Then it could impact key habitat areas off the coast of Iceland that are used by a multitude of marine animals and birds.

Okay, so it’s bad, but not catastrophic. What’s the big deal, anyway? A bunch of crap left over from Iceworm might be exposed in a region where almost nobody lives. It’s not like this waste is going to be coming up from the ground in midtown Manhattan. And why should we be so worried about this waste? Sounds fairly standard to me.

No. Remember when I mentioned the PCBs? They are particularly nasty. The military used PCBs—more formally known as polychlorinated biphenyl—in a lot of its paints used in the Arctic region during the early Cold War because PCBs are especially resistant to extreme temperatures. They also don’t quickly break down once in the environment—which is great for longevity when in use, but it also means they can last a long time cycling among air, water, and soil. They can be carried long distances, and have been found in snow and seawater in areas far from where they were released into the environment. So even though they would be released way the hell up in the Arctic, they could find their way to a neighborhood near you.

PCBs have been shown in multiple peer-reviewed studies to cause cancer in animals (and likely humans) as well as a number of serious noncancer health effects in both animals and humans, including harmful effects on the immune system, reproductive system, nervous system, and endocrine system. PCBs can also cause deficits in neurological development, including visual recognition, short-term memory, and learning.

Thanks a lot, guys.

The International Space Station is powered by eight arrays of solar panels, totaling 262,400 solar cells. Each of the arrays (the technical term for a grouping of interconnected solar panels) is 112 feet long and 39 feet wide, and combine to cover an area of nearly 27,000 square feet—about an acre, or more than half the area of an NFL football field.

Solar power works great for anything operating close to (you guessed it) the sun. The Hubble Space Telescope, the Magellan spacecraft to Venus, the Mars Global Surveyor, and the Mars Observer all use (or used) solar power. Vanguard 1, the first solar-powered satellite sent into space in 1958, transmitted information back to the United States for years. The Juno mission to Jupiter, launched in 2011, broke the record for solar-powered distance in January 2016 when it traveled 493 million miles from the sun.