There are heaps of WWII junk rusting in Greenland’s fjords — and the photos are eerily beautiful

Hey America, you forgot a huge pile of junk in the wilderness.

Abandoned by the US Air Force in 1947, Bluie East Two is one of several World War II and Cold War installations left to crumble in Greenland after the military lost interest in maintaining them. (Another, from the Army's secret "Project Iceworm,"could soon leak toxic nuclear waste into the environment.) 

"Bluie" was military code for Greenland during the war with Germany. Bluie East Two was one of three aircraft bases maintained on the Danish territory in North America as part of the US Atlantic defense scheme of the period.

In two trips in the summers of 2014 and 2015, landscape photographer Ken Bower traveled to Bluie East Two to shoot the hulks of rusted equipment, aviation fuel barrels, and collapsed buildings still strewn across the earth at the lip of great fjord. He said he hopes his images bring attention to the problem, along with a petition to clean up the site he's circulated in hopes of catching the White House's attention.

Here — in photos, some published for the first time on Business Insider — is what he saw.

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"Going down the fjord on a sunny day," he said, "if the sun is hitting these barrels it kind of looks like flowers from a distance."

That's why the Inuit people who live in the area call the rusted remains "American Flowers."

"From the beach there's a little hill that goes up, probably at least 100 feet or so, so that you'll see lines of barrels," Bower said.