The beginning of this true story starts like the best movies. We are at the end of 1940, in a room where senior officials from the United States and Denmark have met at the request of the former. In the background, an unusual offer: the Americans want to Buy a piece of Greenland for 100 million dollars. That was the beginning of a negotiation with a very filmy ending, one that has now been seen through NASA’s radars.
The agency finds “something.” It happened in April 2024, when a space agency flight over Greenland detected something unusual: the remains of what looked like a base. Further analysis discovered that it was Camp Century, the secret base built by the United States in 1959 during the Cold War.
The discovery was made possible thanks to the UAVSAR radar, which was initially being tested to map the inner layers of the ice sheet. The images revealed structures of the base with unprecedented clarity, although with some distortions caused by the technology.
Camp Century. Designed to house up to 200 soldiers, the “city” was abandoned in 1967, being buried under more than 30 meters of ice and snow, along with tons of radioactive waste from its nuclear reactor. This site, initially intended for polar research, now lies hidden in the frozen desert, but its history is much more complicated than it seems.
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The intrastory. We return to the beginning in that room. The doubt in a context like the beginning of the Cold War was more than reasonable. Why would the United States want a piece of that inhospitable and icy place on the planet, offering no less than 100 million of the time? When asked, the United States delegation said that they were seeking to establish an air base and that the army was interested in having permanent access to the ice sheet of the enclave in order to develop a series of techniques for the construction of structures on and under the ice
What did Denmark do? He did not agree to the sale, but they felt they owed a debt of gratitude after the Second World War. Thus, the Danish government grants the Americans permission to establish their air base and their Army engineers to visit and find a remote, desolate, flat area of the ice sheet on which to experiment with its construction. In this way, the United States began two projects: the Thule air base, and another 240 km away, defined then as “a city under the ice.”
Camp Century seen by NASA radar from the air
Camp Century. That was the code name for a project that was much more. Located about 150 kilometers from Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base), Camp Century was built between 1959 and 1960. It consisted of 21 steel tunnels almost three kilometers in total, with infrastructure that included dormitories, a hospital, recreational areas , kitchen and, of course, a nuclear plant that provided light and heating to the entire premises, everything was powered by a PM-2 reactor.
Additionally, the base could house 200 people and relied on innovative technology such as ice melt water wells and advanced ventilation systems. Despite temperatures of -57°C and winds of up to 193 km/h, the base was a safe haven against nuclear attacks and had interconnected tunnels and an electric train system for internal transportation. However, the instability of the ice made the entire plan unsustainable, and the project was eventually abandoned in 1967.
Iconic cover of the February 1960 issue of Popular Science on the “goodness” of the project
Nuclear weapons. Years and decades passed. It was never heard of again until the mid-90s through declassified documents from the United States that came to light through Danish researchers. The papers not only showed that the United States had routinely flown nuclear weapons over Greenland in the 1960s, they also revealed that they had been storing nuclear weapons at Thule Air Base, the complete opposite of what they had expressed publicly when they signed the agreement. agreement with Denmark.
Investigators also discovered that the Danish government itself knew all along about the Americans’ practices and had been lying to its citizens for 30 years, which ended up being called Thule-Gate in Denmark.
Iceworm. The big bomb of the documents appeared shortly after through a report that detailed the design of a base totally different from the one that had been promoted at the time. Codenamed Project Iceworm, the plan’s goal was to test whether it was feasible to permanently drill deep vertical boreholes into the Greenland ice.
The reason? Conceal up to 2,100 nuclear missile silos and 60 launch control centers. These missiles would move constantly on subway trains to avoid being located, ensuring responsiveness. All with the same objective, whatever might happen: the nearby Soviet enclaves.
And there is still more. Those papers also showed that nuclear missiles, called Ice Man, were an unprecedented variant with which to experiment with these weapons under the ice. It also emerged that Army engineers first experimented with ice construction techniques at another secret Greenland space known as Project Fistclench, before moving on to build Camp Century in order to test their complex “nuclear” ice designs under the guise , facing the public, of a scientific effort.
Its importance by accident. Despite its abandonment, Camp Century continues to provide valuable information. Thanks to their initial research, as US engineers drilled deep into the Greenland ice sheet and extracted some of the first deep ice cores, researchers obtained this previously unobtainable material for the first time.
It was an unprecedented advance for science, since these nuclei continue to offer valuable information today. In particular, chemical analysis of ice sheets has been used to establish a link between atmospheric greenhouse gases and global temperatures. Analysis that contributes to better understanding past climate conditions and projecting the impact of climate change in the future.
Imagen | National Archives
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