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Camp Century was described at the time as a demonstration of affordable ice-cap military outposts. The secret Project Iceworm was to be a system of tunnels 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) in length, used to deploy up to 600 nuclear missiles that would be able to reach the Soviet Union in case of nuclear war.
Greenland is closer to Russia than the ICBM fields located in the continental U.S. Rumor has it that the Danish government had no idea that the U.S. was considering installing nuclear missiles on Greenland.
The base operated from 1959 to 1966 when shifting icecap made living there impossible. Today, it’s buried and crushed beneath the Arctic snows.
I've reading The Universe Within - The Deep History of the Human Body - and its author Neil Shubin, who has done paleontological research in Greenland, makes a passing reference to a US government project that seems right out of a thriller.
The plan, Shubin writes, was concocted by the Pentagon and consisted on carving silos within the ice for six hundred nuclear warheads. Connecting these silos were to be tunnels that contained an entire underground city given the futuristic name Camp Century.
The plan, Shubin writes, was concocted by the Pentagon and consisted on carving silos within the ice for six hundred nuclear warheads. Connecting these silos were to be tunnels that contained an entire underground city given the futuristic name Camp Century.
The project was started secretly in 1959 in northern Greenland, when twenty-one tunnels were dug with heavy equipment flown from bases far to the south.
In its heyday, this city under the ice housed over two hundred people and contained a shop, hospital, theater, even a church.
In its heyday, this city under the ice housed over two hundred people and contained a shop, hospital, theater, even a church.
Power was supplied by the world's first portable nuclear reactor, the plucky Alco PM-2A. Heat from the reactor melted ice to provide the sub-glacial city with water. It resembled a human ant farm.
The plan worked well, continues Shubin, except for one problem: ice moves. By 1966, it had become clear that the ice was shifting so extensively that warping tunnels would destroy expensive equipment.
VIDEO Camp Century, Greenland: Project Iceworm
City Under Ice - Tunnel to Russia - Cold War
Inside one of the main tunnels in Camp Century, 1962
Details of the missile base project were secret for decades, first coming to light in January 1995 and resulting in a political scandal, when the Danish Foreign Policy Institute (DUPI) was asked by the Folketing (Danish Parliament) to research the history of nuclear weapons in Greenland during the Cold War.
The "official purpose" of Camp Century, as explained by the United States Department of Defense to Danish government officials in 1960, was to test various construction techniques under Arctic conditions, explore practical problems with a semi-mobile nuclear reactor, as well as supporting scientific experiments on the icecap.
The following pictures are from DefenseTech:
One of the base's 16 escape hatches onto the surface of Greenland.
Under construction
One of the prefab buildings inside the tunnels of Camp Century.
The base water well, dug 150-feet into the ice
where a heating coil then melted ice for fresh drinking water.
The nuclear reactor
The reactor controls
Camp Century location
The base in 1969, three years after it was abandoned.
The scientific explanation for icecap shifting:
Wikipedia - Although the Greenland icecap appears, on its surface, to be hard and immobile, snow and ice are viscoelastic materials, which slowly deform over time, depending on temperature and density.
Despite its seeming stability, the icecap is, in fact, in constant, slow movement, spreading outward from the center. This spreading movement, over the course of a year, causes tunnels and trenches to narrow, as their walls deform and bulge, eventually leading to a collapse of the ceiling.
By the summer of 1962 the ceiling of the reactor room within Camp Century had dropped and had to be lifted 5 feet (1.5 m).
During a planned reactor shutdown for maintenance in late July 1963, the Army decided to operate Camp Century as a summer-only camp and did not reactivate the PM-2A reactor.
The camp resumed operations in summer 1964 using its standby Diesel power plant, the portable reactor was removed that summer, and the camp was abandoned altogether in 1966.
Sources for this article:
http://defensetech.org/2012/04/06/inside-the-armys-secret-cold-war-ice-base/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
http://io9.com/5740188/project-iceworm-the-nuclear-city-hidden-under-greenlands-glaciers
Book The Universe Within by Neil Shubin, page 158
Sources for this article:
http://defensetech.org/2012/04/06/inside-the-armys-secret-cold-war-ice-base/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
http://io9.com/5740188/project-iceworm-the-nuclear-city-hidden-under-greenlands-glaciers
Book The Universe Within by Neil Shubin, page 158
The Universe Within - by Neil Shubin
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