Camp Century was sold as a place where engineers could learn to live comfortably within an ice sheet- funny thing to say until one sees between the lines the reason why.
In 1959, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers excavated a fully functional underground colony in the ice at Greenland: dormitories, a kitchen, workshops, a chapel, even a barbershop, in trenches covered with snow and ice. It was located about 120 miles inland of Thule Air Base, now known as Pituffik Space Base, far enough north to ensure that logistics was a punishing burden and the stakes were unusually high.
Camp Century was just a bold polar construction experiment on the surface. It was also a systems test below, of an undetected scheme, Project Iceworm, which was to ascertain whether a missile system might be buried in tunnels under the ice of Greenland. The mechanical theory was plain and mean: since the ice could cover the infrastructure that would not break, it could also cover the weapons. On the grandiose scale of the proposal, 600 missiles in a lattice of tunnel, approximately 4,000 kilometers in a region three times the size of Denmark would be deployed, making glaciology a design consideration and not a curiosity.
Power was what enabled the everyday life of the camp. Camp Century used a portable nuclear reactor, which was a groundbreaking decision at the time, and substituted enormous fuel convoys with a small power plant. But the ice that had sealed up the tunnels was not inactive, but slowly but persistently, drifted down. There was much crew supervision of the settled ceilings and moving walls as trenches moved out of position. The evaluation of the engineers came very soon: the ice could not be utilized as a sustainable base of a fixed, weapons accuracy-focused corridor. By 1963, Project Iceworm was scrapped and by 1967, Camp Century was shut down.
The building vanished, and the byproducts were left.
At the time the camp was decommissioned, the reactor core was taken offsite, and a list of buried materials was abandoned- a policy that was supported by an assumption that a continuous snowfall would seal everything up forever. Subsequent studies redefined the location as a decades-old containment issue: diesel, wastewater, industrial chemicals such as PCBs, and low-level radioactive coolant might start moving around in the buried system once meltwater has started flowing through the buried network. In the scientific literature, estimates put down 440,000 liters of waste related to the facility, 200, 000 liters of diesel and 240,000 liters of waste water.
The camp was discovered again, in April 2024, not by digging, but as a design of artificial reflections in radar images. A NASA plane surveying the ice sheet using UAVSAR synthetic aperture radar generated data of sufficient dimensions to differentiate between the discrete structural lines that can be compared to the layouts of history. “We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century.” It was chance, but the suggestion was not: the Arctic is now able to discover, map and follow buried infrastructure on numerous occasions, whether or not someone intended it to be discovered again.
The more important implication of Camp Century is no longer the boldness of constructing an icy city. The disjunction between Cold War predictors, frozen ice, final burial and a warming climate, which alters the flow of contaminants, their destinations and those who eventually bear the engineering and environmental cost of cleanup is what creates the mismatch.
