The U.S. has left thousands of tons of hazardous waste, environmental toxins, oil-contaminated soil, and radioactive wastewater in Greenland

Hundreds of rusty oil drums, car batteries, wreckage, worn-out pipes, cables, and shattered asbestos sheets lie in heaps along the coast as far as the eye can see.

The contrast with the crystal-blue icebergs slowly drifting by in the background is jarring.

Storch Lund, 69, points around the landscape.

»All of this is American leftovers«, he says.

We are in Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland, home to the United States’ largest base in Greenland during World War II. A small airport and the town that grew up around it, where thousands of American soldiers moved in after the base was built in 1941.

Storch Lund has lived in the town for more than 50 years and knows every hill and gravel path in the area. That includes the so-called dump near the fjord a few hundred meters from the runway.

Here, tons of waste are scattered across several hectares. Along the shoreline, left in the pale green meltwater river that runs into the fjord. In some places, oil drums and wreckage sit in layers several feet high. Elsewhere, it has been buried.

»You can see they pushed it out toward the water. If you walk along the beach, you can see how much pollution there is«, Storch Lund says.

As a boy, he played among the wreckage, hardened tar, and asbestos sheets. Today, he looks at the contamination differently.

»It’s a mess«, he says.

He worries the fjord has been polluted, too.

»For many, many years, oil seeped into the water. Quite a few airplanes were sunk out in the fjord«, says Storch Lund, a trained mechanic who previously served as Narsarsuaq’s airport manager for more than 20 years.

The Americans left the military base in Narsarsuaq in 1958, without cleaning up. Now they want to come back.

»A stain on the map«

America’s interest in Greenland has waxed – and faded – repeatedly over the course of history.

During World War II and the Cold War, the United States operated at least 36 bases and military installations in Greenland. Today, the Americans have only the large Pituffik base in northern Greenland left. But right now, high-stakes diplomatic negotiations are underway between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland, as the American government seeks to reopen more bases.

A spokesman for the U.S. military has specifically pointed to Narsarsuaq and Kangerlussuaq as bases the Americans want to return to.

As dramatic background music, President Donald Trump has long threatened to take over the world’s largest island. As recently as this week, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Jeff Landry, posted about Greenland in a menacing tone, claiming that the United States could be one state richer next year.

That is why Politiken has traveled to Greenland to examine how the United States left behind its many former bases.

We have seen the contamination with our own eyes.

Over the years, articles have described American remnants in Greenland, but Politiken is the first media outlet to map the pollution from U.S. bases using several thousand pages of documents obtained through access-to-information requests, including environmental studies and records from Danish and Greenlandic authorities.

Several of the environmental studies have not previously been made public.

The scale of the contamination is striking, Politiken’s mapping shows.

Several thousand tons of hazardous or contaminated waste have been left in Greenland’s natural environment: up to 100,000 rusty, corroded oil drums; oil pollution from more than 400,000 liters of diesel fuel; up to 24 million liters of low-level radioactive wastewater left beneath the ice sheet; several tons of abandoned batteries; findings of the toxic pollutant PCB far above regulatory limits; and heavy metals such as lead and cadmium at nearly all of the at least 36 former American bases and military installations.

The true contamination is even greater. A long list of former American bases and sites have never been fully investigated environmentally – including some of the very largest, such as Narsarsuaq and Pituffik.

Several prominent Greenlandic politicians are sharply critical of the pollution left behind in Greenland.

»It’s a stain. And you can see it. This is how they treat our country«, says Aleqa Hammond, chair of the Siumut party and a former head of government in Greenland.

She believes the United States has managed to »get away with it.«

»We have not seen American participation in cleaning up their own leftovers at all«, she says.

Bentiaraq Ottosen, a member of the Environment and Nature Committee in Greenland’s parliament, Inatsisartut, from the Atassut party, agrees.

»I believe the Americans have fled from their responsibility. They’ve just left all sorts of scrap and just dumped cars and all kinds of other things out in nature«, he says.

Naaja Nathanielsen, a member of Denmark’s Parliament for Greenland’s governing party IA and a former Greenlandic minister for business, trade, raw materials, and justice, echoes the criticism and adds context:

»We have tried to tell them, with mixed success, that leaving something behind is a manifestation of disrespect. ‘You were allowed to come and be there.’ ‘You benefited from being able to hold that position.’ So I also think the least you can do is clean up«, says Naaja Nathanielsen.

Over Greenland’s head

To understand how it ended up like this, one must dive into the history books.

During World War II and the early Cold War, the large island became a red-hot area of interest for the U.S. military. First in the fight against Nazi Germany and later as a resource depot, a laboratory for polar warfare, and a forward outpost against the communist Soviet Union.

From the outset, the terms of the American presence were negotiated in a complicated defense-policy game, in which the Americans did not always tell the Danish government the truth about their plans, and the Danish government often acted over Greenlanders’ heads.

On April 9, 1941– the very anniversary of Germany’s occupation of Denmark – Denmark’s envoy to the United States, Henrik Kauffmann, acting on his own as a self-appointed representative of the government in Copenhagen, signed a defense agreement with the United States that granted Washington the right to establish airports and ports as military bases in Greenland.

The Danish government later fired Henrik Kauffmann, accused him of treason, and declared the agreement invalid, but the United States ignored that. The Americans began establishing bases across Greenland. After World War II, the United States saw itself as the protector of the free world; and felt that came with clear privileges.

Right after the war, the American government tried – not for the first time, and not for the last – to buy Greenland. It offered about $100 million.

Copenhagen’s response was a polite no, thank you.

»Even though we owe America a great deal, I do not feel that we owe them the entire island of Greenland«, Denmark’s foreign minister at the time, Gustav Rasmussen, said.

In 1950, the Americans drafted a polar strategy that called for extracting uranium in Greenland, establishing remote-controlled missiles with a range of 2,000 to 2,500 kilometers, and developing »means of transport under the ice.«

Foto: Topfoto/Ritzau Scanpix

It was a strategy whose full scope the Danes would not learn for decades.

The following year – in 1951 – the Danish and American governments signed a defense agreement to defend Greenland jointly under NATO.

The United States was granted access to establish »defense areas« in Greenland by agreement with Denmark. In those areas »as well as the airspace above them and adjacent waters,« the United States could »organize the area for military use.«

Article XI of the 1951 defense agreement included the language that has since been the United States’ argument for not needing to clean up after itself:

»It is understood that no areas or facilities made available to the Government of the United States of America pursuant to the present agreement need be left in the condition in which they were found at the time they were thus made available.«

Many of the American bases in Greenland were therefore abandoned in haste, left as they were.

That includes one of the United States’ most controversial military installations in Greenland.

About 225 kilometers east of the large Pituffik base in Greenland’s northeastern corner, the United States in 1959 established a science-fiction-like experimental station under the ice sheet, complete with a small nuclear power plant. They named it Camp Century.

The station consisted of an extensive tunnel system with a 330-meter-long ‘main street’ and more than 20 adjoining tunnels. The nuclear reactor provided electricity and heat for the base and its 225 men. The Americans began construction without having received final approval from Copenhagen. What the Danes were not told was that the camp was intended as the first installation in a groundbreaking new Cold War project that would enable the United States to transport and launch nuclear-armed missiles from a base beneath the ice.

That strategy was later abandoned. The United States removed the nuclear reactor a few years before leaving the base in 1966. But up to 24 million liters of low-level radioactive wastewater, 9,000 tons of construction debris, and 200,000 liters of diesel fuel were left under the ice, according to a report by an international research team in 2016.

It is still there.

Camp Century, like other areas, was left behind with little involvement from Greenlanders.

»The construction of the bases and the way they have been left behind happened over Greenlanders’ heads, and they had no influence whatsoever on what happened«, says Mikkel Myrup, an area manager at Greenland’s National Museum.

Massive oil pollution

Oil contamination, in particular, is a massive problem at former American bases.

That is true, among other places, on the southern Greenlandic island of Simiutaq, which the Americans named Bluie West 3 and used as a manned weather and radio station.

More than 50 years after the United States left the base, American leftovers still mar Greenland’s extraordinary natural landscape.

Only minutes after we arrive at the island’s old natural harbor, we encounter rusty oil drums, vehicles, and wreckage. Three separate dumps of barrels and scrap have been placed around the landscape, rolled down slopes and hidden away in valleys. Oil and tar compounds lie hardened in small streams that trickle down toward the fjord.

There is also more recent trash. But the American leftovers are unmistakable. They are also clearly marked in the environmental study we have tucked under our arm.

Samples taken by the engineering firm Niras found »severe oil contamination« with so-called free-phase oil, meaning the oil can move through the terrain. In total, the site is estimated to contain about 10,000 cubic meters of oil-contaminated soil – or 10 million liters. That is the equivalent of four Olympic swimming pools filled with oil-contaminated soil. At the Simiutaq weather station alone.

Farther up Greenland’s west coast – just under 70 kilometers south of Nuuk – the Americans left at least 8,000 oil drums at the Marraq base, or Bluie West 4, as the Americans called it. There, the engineering company Carl Bro also found »severe oil contamination,« according to documents Politiken reviewed through access-to-information requests.

»A cautious estimate of the total amount of diesel oil that has contaminated the site is calculated at approximately 120,000 liters of diesel oil or more«, the report states.

The contamination was »so severe that a strong smell of oil could still be detected at the site,« even though the pollution had occurred roughly 50 years earlier.

The oil contamination is most dramatic at the Ikkatteq base on Greenland’s forbidding east coast.

Here, the Americans left tens of thousands of oil drums and old vehicles across an area of more than 25,000 square meters. In several places, the barrels lay stacked two or three layers deep. Danish authorities began cleaning up the site seven years ago. As part of that effort, Mikkel Myrup from Greenland’s National Museum visited the remote base.

»We could see that waste oil was running out of many of the drums. You could see in the soil that it was oil-contaminated«, he says.

The Ikkatteq base, which served as a landing strip for the U.S. Air Force, stored thousands of liters of fuel for aircraft stopping over.

»There were more than 100,000 drums scattered around the landscape. Vehicles and buildings with asbestos that have collapsed. The base was left behind without any form of disposal«, says Mikkel Myrup.

The area is popular with local mussel gatherers. In a single day, the consulting firm Cowi observed »15 small boats with mussel gatherers« off Ikkatteq. And that may be problematic, Cowi assesses in a report obtained by Politiken.

»The substances detected in soil and water samples may pose a risk to marine life close to the coast, including especially mussels in the fjord where the stream from the lake empties. The mussels are collected and eaten by locals who sail to Ikkatteq«, the report says.

Foto: Ivor Prickett/panos Pictures/Ritzau Scanpix

That contamination has spread into the marine environment near the bases is a documented problem in several places – including at Marraq and the base on Simiutaq, which Politiken visited. There, the engineering firm Niras also concludes that the oil contamination has caused a »severe impact on the marine area,« as »high oil concentrations in mussels and sediment« have been found.

Even so, local Greenlandic mussel fishers are not warned about the contamination.

»The department has not in recent times issued guidelines for the harvesting of animals close to American bases in Greenland«, writes Anna Jespersen, the chief veterinarian at Greenland’s Ministry of Fisheries, Hunting, Agriculture, and Self-Sufficiency.

She adds that the department does not »have the knowledge or resources needed to be able to make recommendations.«

Asbestos from military hospital

Another major environmental problem is the amount of asbestos the Americans left behind.

Environmental studies of American bases show that asbestos is found in abandoned buildings at roughly every base that has been examined.

It is particularly evident in Narsarsuaq, the Americans’ main base during World War II. A few kilometers from the runway, the United States built a 250-bed military hospital. The hospital remained relatively intact until 1972, when it burned, and then for years lay as a junk heap in the landscape.

»I remember it myself. I saw the buildings when I was a little boy«, says Ole Guldager, who grew up in Narsarsuaq in the 1970s, trained as an archaeologist at the University of Copenhagen, and now runs the small Narsarsuaq Museum.

In the 1980s, the remains of the military hospital were bulldozed, but the asbestos sheets were left behind. Today, small white asbestos fragments lie scattered through the valley like crushed crackers.

Several locals describe how, for years, they let their children play in the area, since for decades they were unaware of the asbestos from the old hospital.

»As it is now, it’s completely filled with asbestos sheets. Nothing has been cleaned up at all«, says the former airport manager, Storch Lund.

Foto: Martin Lehmann

Documents obtained by Politiken show that both Danish and Greenlandic authorities are aware of the contamination.

In 2019, a small group of researchers from Aarhus University did fieldwork in Narsarsuaq. They observed shattered asbestos sheets spread around the area. The researchers took samples home and soon determined that it was asbestos.

Ole Guldager was allowed to see the test results.

»They were so serious that the university considered whether it was safe to have their students walking around in the area«, he says.

The Danish researchers also informed Greenland’s chief medical officer about the serious findings.

»The chief medical officer has asked the Greenlandic authorities to take initiatives that reduce the health risk«, according to minutes from a meeting that Politiken has seen.

But after that, little seems to have happened.

A memo from the Danish Defense’s Estate and Terrain Command states that »signs should have been put up in the area informing that asbestos materials are present.« But there were no signs when Politiken walked among the small crushed asbestos fragments.

The asbestos example in Narsarsuaq shows how responsibility evaporates between authorities.

The Americans left the asbestos in the area. The Environment Ministry in Copenhagen makes it clear that responsibility for Narsarsuaq has been transferred to Greenlandic authorities. Greenland’s Ministry of Environment, Energy, Nature, and Research notes in a reply to Politiken that the starting point is that »those who left the waste should pay to have it removed.« It is the local municipality’s responsibility to »try to find the owner,« since municipalities are the primary authority on waste management.

Ole Guldager contacted the local municipality, Kujalleq Kommune. He informed a member of the municipal council about the problem and requested »a thorough investigation of asbestos contamination in all of Narsarsuaq.« But he never heard back from the municipality.

We asked Kujalleq Kommune what it did in response to the inquiry from one of its residents, but the municipality has not replied.

Today, several residents of Narsarsuaq fear that the strong winds that roar down between the mountains are blowing asbestos from Hospital Valley over the village.

»We are directly downwind. Has it affected people who have lived here for 50 or 60 years? There’s no way to know. But I think we owe the people of Narsarsuaq – and everyone who has lived here before – at least to investigate it. It’s indefensible not to«, says Ole Guldager.

Agreement: The U.S. must remove hazardous substances

In the 1990s, the Americans, for a time, had lost focus on Greenland.

Most bases were abandoned. Only Thule Air Base, renamed Pituffik Space Base in April 2023, remained a fixture for the United States.

Greenlandic politicians raised concerns about the enormous amounts of waste the Americans had left behind, with tacit Danish acceptance.

Foto: Ukendt/Ritzau Scanpix

On March 13, 1991, then–Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen (Venstre, V) and his American counterpart signed an agreement in which the United States promised to »remove or otherwise neutralize« all known hazardous substances – including waste oil, chemical solvents, asbestos, and PCBs – from military facilities the Americans abandoned.

The Americans apparently walked away from that promise 11 years later.

When the United States prepared to leave and return the Dundas area, closely connected to the Pituffik base in far northern Greenland, it refused, according to then–Environment Minister Svend Auken (Socialdemokratiet, S), to clean up after itself because it would then be forced to do the same at its other bases around the world.

»They said, ‘if you press us, we won’t give you an inch of it’«, Svend Auken later told The Christian Science Monitor.

Mikaela Engell from Denmark’s Foreign Ministry, who later became Denmark’s High Commissioner in Nuuk, was quoted as saying that there had been »a total reversal of the American position on the environment between 1991 and 2003.«

A Pentagon spokesman described it in the same outlet as burden-sharing: the United States had, through its military facilities, provided defense for the free world – so others would have to provide theirs by taking on the cleanup.

The law was ambiguous. The 1991 agreement specified that it did not override the 1951 defense agreement, which established that the United States is not obligated to leave areas in Greenland in the same condition as when it took them over. It therefore became largely a political question: how firm would Denmark be in insisting that the United States clean up? When the Dundas agreement was finally concluded in 2002 under then–Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (V), Denmark ended up assuming full responsibility for the enormous quantities of American waste in Dundas.

Politiken asked the U.S. Department of Defense and Denmark’s Ministry of the Environment whether they consider the 1991 agreement to be valid and complied with.

Neither the Danish nor the American authorities responded.

The U.S. Department of Defense, the Pentagon, also did not respond to why the United States will not help pay for cleanup in Greenland, or to other questions from Politiken.

Complaint to the United Nations

In the 2010s, prominent Greenlandic politicians intensified their criticism of America’s leftovers.

That criticism contributed to the Danish government’s 2012 agreement with Greenland’s self-government to clean up after Denmark’s own military in Greenland. But the deal said nothing about American remnants.

In 2017, Greenland’s then–foreign minister, Vittus Qujaukitsoq, had had enough. Without backing from the head of self-government, he filed a complaint with the U.N. Human Rights Council, arguing that Denmark, in his view, was not doing enough to ensure cleanup of U.S. military installations.

It was the first time Greenland filed a complaint about Denmark with the United Nations.

The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes, Baskut Tuncak, took the complaint seriously and later concluded that »Denmark must identify and remove all military waste left in Greenland« that the Greenlandic people want removed.

In the same letter, the United States was »strongly« urged to participate and contribute to the effort.

That did not change the U.S. position. But the following year, the Danish government decided to allocate 180 million kroner over six years to clean up selected American bases.

A Danish-Greenlandic steering group, chaired by Denmark’s Ministry of the Environment, has been put in charge of the work, to which the United States does not contribute.

The money allocated in 2018 is far from spent, and only a small portion of the bases have been cleaned up so far.

Politiken posed a series of questions to Denmark’s environment minister, Maria Reumert Gjerding (SF), about American contamination and Denmark’s cleanup effort. Several of them she did not answer.

In an email to Politiken, Maria Reumert Gjerding wrote:

»It is important that we follow the political agreement to clean up after the former American military presence in Greenland – and that we do it properly. We owe that to nature and to the Greenlandic people. The work is underway, but conditions are difficult, and it takes time. I am following the progress, and we have set aside funds to continue the task in close cooperation with Greenland«.

But in hindsight, it appears »both wrong and unhelpful« that Denmark for so long failed to involve Greenland or take responsibility for America’s leftovers, says Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen, who leads the Center for Science Studies at Aarhus University and is co-author of a book about Camp Century.

It has left a fundamental mistrust in Greenland that now gets in the way as Greenland and Denmark together must deal with threats from Donald Trump, he notes.

»It’s hard to assess whether it could have been avoided, but it certainly isn’t helpful in the current situation that we have created that kind of antagonism and enemy imagery«, Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen says.

Who will pay in the future?

As the United States now wants to return to several of its old bases and expand its military presence in Greenland, several voices in Greenland are urging that the mistakes not be repeated.

»With the knowledge we have today about the past, it would be wise to consider whether this can be done in a more sensible way when new agreements are made, so we don’t end up facing the same problems again«, says Mikkel Myrup of Greenland’s National Museum.

»In Greenland, we have a principle: the polluter pays. That should apply to everyone — including the United States«, says Naaja Nathanielsen, a member of Denmark’s Parliament for the governing party IA.

The U.S. Department of Defense did not respond to the criticism from Greenlandic politicians.

In Narsarsuaq, Storch Lund still dreams that the pollution he crawled around in as a child will be cleaned up.

»It would be so wonderful if it were all removed. But it’s a huge job. There is so much soil that’s contaminated«, he says.

Several locals tell Politiken that over the past six months, envoys from the U.S. military have visited Narsarsuaq and inspected the runway, the town’s hotel, and the old airport.

Asked whether the American military personnel also visited the large area of American waste, Storch Lund replies:

»No, they didn’t go out there«.