The Military Base Buried Beneath The Ice

In 1959, the U.S. Army began building a base inside the Greenland Ice Sheet. Crews cut long trenches into the ice, built barracks, labs and support buildings inside them, and roofed them over. The camp ran on a portable nuclear reactor, carried in piece by piece. Publicly, Camp Century was a polar research station, and the science was real. Researchers there drilled some of the first deep ice cores, and in 1966 a thermal drill at the camp bored all the way through the ice sheet. Those cores are still cited in climate research today. But the camp had a second purpose. It was the test site for Project Iceworm, a secret Army plan to build about 2,500 miles of tunnels under the ice and hide hundreds of nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. The Army didn't immediately tell the Danish government, which governed Greenland, what the project really was. The ice won. A glacier isn't solid rock. It moves and flows, and the walls of Camp Century kept creeping inward, squeezing the tunnels and forcing crews into constant repair work. Problems with the reactor led to its removal after less than three years of operation. Project Iceworm was judged unworkable, and in 1967 the Army abandoned Camp Century completely. The Army left most of the camp behind: buildings, fuel, sewage, and low-level radioactive waste from the reactor's cooling system. The assumption was that snowfall would bury all of it permanently. For decades, it did. Year after year, snow piled up on top of the camp until it lay about 100 feet down. The full story of Project Iceworm didn't come out until the 1990s, when declassified documents and a Danish government inquiry brought it to light. Then, in April 2024, a NASA team flying about 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base was testing a new radar instrument, trying to map the bedrock beneath the ice. Instead, the radar returned the outline of Camp Century's buried structures in more detail than had ever been seen. "We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century," one of the scientists said. The ice sheet is now thinning. Researchers are working to estimate when melting could bring the camp and its waste back toward the surface, and NASA has projected surface ice loss around the site by 2090. A base built to hide from the world, and left to be buried forever, may eventually come back up.