How Climate Change Will Make Pollution Even Worse
Pollution has existed as long as humans have. Early hunters and gatherers discharged bones and stones after a meal. In antiquity, the garbage of large cities was disposed of in landfills outside the city limits. With the industrial revolution, the invention of plastic in 1907 and mass production of goods, today's piles of trash grow exponentially. Today, there is plastic in the oceans, landfills full of rubbish and even the Noon's surface is covered by litter, like golf balls (from the Apollo 14 mission in 1971) and disposable bags.
Humanity has a trash problem - and climate change could make things worse.
Camp Century, “the city under the ice”, was a research station and a strategic outpost in the Cold War located on the icecap of Greenland and built in 1959 by the U.S. Army. This camp, consisting of a system of tunnels excavated into the ice, was powered by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator. In 1967, the camp was abandoned, along with tanks full of diesel fuel, wastewater, organic pollutants and unknown amounts of radioactive waste produced by the generator. At the time, it was believed that ice and snow would cover the entire site and bury all the toxic waste. And for the the next forty years, Camp Century was indeed slowly buried by 100 feet of snow and ice.
US Department of Defense