These islands support 2000+ year-old cultures, yet the amount of land and water available for human habitation, water and food sources, and ecosystems is limited and extremely vulnerable to marine inundation from sea-level rise. Sea-level rise is particularly critical for unconsolidated low-lying coral atoll islands, many of which have maximum elevations of less than 4.0 m above present sea level, such as Kwajalein. Recent estimates suggest sea level will exceed 1.0 m, and may reach 2.0 m, above 2000 levels by the end of the 21st century. Observations show that sea level is rising globally at a rate almost double the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s 2007 report, and up to half an order of magnitude greater in the central and western Pacific Ocean. This image shows how the high hydrodynamic roughness of live, healthy corals causes friction that induces breaking of waves over coral reefs, reducing wave energy at the shoreline that can cause flooding and island overwash. history.) Oh, and there's unexploded ordinance left over from Cold War missile tests around the site, and arctic " wormholes" (.pdf) of frozen ice that can collapse when you step on them.Underwater image of a wave breaking over a coral reef on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. (These extreme conditions hampered clean-up during one of the " worst "Broken Arrow" nuclear accidents in U.S. Four months of every year are without sunlight, and sea access is blocked by ice for nine months. #KWAJALEIN ATOLL MILITARY BASE SKIN#The temperatures regularly drop to negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, with storms that can lead to frostbite on exposed skin in less than a minute. Though it's a bit tricky keeping everything functioning up in Thule. The good news is that the radar has found another job monitoring satellites and scanning for space debris. The dangers of a nuclear missile attack on the United States of the kind the Pentagon feared in the 1970s and 1980s - and which would necessitate immovable radars in the Arctic - is now largely unthinkable. Called the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) at Thule Air Base, the radar works by blasting a constant beam of radio waves off the ionosphere, instantly detecting any object flying over the North Pole once it crosses the horizon.īut since the end of the Cold War, BMEWS at Thule has seen its mission recede in importance, a kind of post-1980s job security crisis for missile-tracking radars. military's most isolated bases, and home to one of the Pentagon's primary tools for keeping an eye out for intercontinental ballistic missile launches: a giant phased array radar. From the deserts of Utah to the islands of the Arctic Circle and the Pacific, here are seven such bases.Īlong the frigid northwestern coast of Greenland lies one of the U.S. Implicit in their location is the idea that no matter how extreme or odd or isolated a location, the military can build a place to track intercontinental ballistic missiles, launch secretive drones, or hook up an array of antennas that can study the ionosphere. There are also the bases built as a consequence of Cold War nuclear paranoia, now acting as a shelter for paranoia over terrorism and global pandemics.Īside from their obscurity, these bases are monuments to the military's faith in technology. But instead of closing them down, the Pentagon has found new reasons to justify their existence. Some bases built during the Cold War have found their original reason for existing suddenly disappear. Some are obscure because the Pentagon doesn't like to advertise what they do. Others are far-flung spots of particular interest to scientists, in areas few could survive unshielded from the elements. Some are out-of-the-way test sites for the latest military and space technology. Often it prefers strange, far-flung and obscure parts of the world - particularly when it comes to its geekiest endeavors. The military doesn't always pick prime real estate for its bases.
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