Last April, a NASA scientific plane flew over Greenland to map the depth of the ice cap using radar. Surprisingly, the images revealed Camp Century, a secret US military base from the Cold War era.
« We were looking for the ice bed and we discovered Camp Century said Alex Gardner, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “ At first we didn’t know what it was. »
© Nasa A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image of Camp Century in Greenland, captured by a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft in April 2024.
Nuclear missiles aimed at the USSR
Also known as the “City Under the Ice,” Camp Century was built beginning in 1959 by digging beneath Greenland’s icy surface. Spanning 55 hectares, it housed the Iceworm Project which planned the construction of a network of tunnels of more than 4,000 km intended to house 600 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM) loaded with nuclear warheads pointed in the direction of the USSR .
Equipped with a portable nuclear reactor, this military base included a railway, a hospital, a store, a theater and a church, built under the ice cap. Up to 200 people occupied the site. Ultimately, no nuclear warheads were stored at Camp Century and the base was abandoned in 1964 and closed in 1967. The remains are today at least 30 meters below the surface, NASA estimates.
Camp Century is an environmental threat to Greenland
But we had to wait until 1997 to discover this project in detail. According to a 2016 study, weapons, hundreds of thousands of gallons of sewage and fuel, and other contaminants remained buried at Camp Century. The melting of the Greenland ice cap threatens to expose this waste which has potentially already caused pollution due to the deterioration of tanks and storage premises.
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