The locals call the thousands of orange rusted barrels “American flowers.” From afar on a sunny day, the 70-year-old remnants littered across the island of Ikateq in Greenland look like fields of marigolds instead of toxic reminders of World War II.

The United States Air Force established a base on Ikateq called Bluie East Two in 1941, under an agreement between the U.S. and Denmark, the latter of which had claimed Greenland in the early 18th century. The base was abandoned after the war in 1947.

But the U.S. military left behind crumbling asbestos-ridden buildings, countless barrels filled with leaded aviation fuel, corroding metal trucks, and possibly even hundreds of cases of undetonated dynamite, according to an account of a man