Camp Century: Photos of Secret US Military Base Below Greenland’s Ice

Construction began in 1959 on the $8 million remote facility, located about 150 miles away from Thule Air Base, a key Arctic defense outpost and the US’ northernmost active military base; it is now named Pituffik Space Base.

Named Camp Century because it was initially intended to be located 100 miles from the Greenland ice cap, the site was plagued by harsh winter conditions, including winds as high as 125 miles per hour and temperatures as low as -70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Members of the US Army Corps of Engineers transported 6,000 tons of supplies and materials to the site to dig nearly two dozen underground tunnels covered by steel arches and a layer of snow, completing the subterranean base in late 1960.

Camp Century’s largest trench, known as “Main Street,” was about 26 feet wide and stretched over 1,000 feet. The sprawling underground complex housed as many as 200 personnel underground.

Engineers drilled a well in the camp to access 10,000 gallons of fresh water daily, and insulated, heated piping ran throughout the facility for water and electricity.

The base also featured a kitchen and cafeteria, medical clinic, laundry area, communications center, and dormitories. The facility also featured a recreation hall, chapel, and barbershop.

Camp Century was powered by a 400-ton portable nuclear reactor, the first of its kind. Due to the subfreezing temperatures making the metal very brittle, transporting the PM-2 reactor had to be handled with extreme care during installation.

Soldiers maintained the medium-power reactor daily by cutting back snow and ice with chainsaws to protect it from damage. The PM-2 reactor operated for nearly three years before it was deactivated and removed from the facility.

“Think of all the energy and resources it took to do this, to build those tunnels and put soldiers down there. It’s almost science fiction,” Paul Bierman, a geoscientist who studied soil samples from the site, told National Geographic. “No one would dream of doing that today.”

The US publicly presented Camp Century as a scientific research facility, where researchers and engineers were tasked with analyzing ice cap conditions, glacial movement, and cold-weather survival.

However, the scientific objective of the facility was a cover for a top-secret US operation, known as “Project Iceworm,” to store and deploy hundreds of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

The initiative remained covert to circumvent Denmark’s strict nuclear-free policy following WWII while taking advantage of Greenland’s proximity to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Project Iceworm sought to expand the existing facility by an additional 52,000 square miles — three times the size of Denmark — to house 60 launch control centers. The facility would have stored up to 600 “Iceman” missiles, modified two-stage intercontinental ballistic missiles with a range of 3,300 miles.

Aside from its strategic location less than 3,000 miles away from Moscow, Project Iceworm was also seen as a potential way to secure alliances and share nuclear weapons with other NATO countries, particularly France, which wanted to be part of the nuclear partnership between the US and the UK.

However, the military operation faced significant challenges, including overcoming bureaucratic hurdles, modifying the Iceman missile to endure extremely cold conditions, and even just continuing underground operations as the Greenland ice sheet became increasingly unstable.

The Army decided not to risk the loss of hundreds of missiles if the facility collapsed, eventually canceling Project Iceworm just three years after Camp Century was built.

The facility continued to operate at a limited capacity before it was abandoned in 1967.

While missiles were never transported to Camp Century, researchers found some success in their studies of ice cores collected at the site and deep soil analysis.

The research ultimately contributed to the development of climate models, according to Bierman, who is a professor at the University of Vermont. Ancient soil samples collected at Camp Century were composed of leaves, mosses, twigs, and insects that offered Bierman and his team into how the climate crisis could impact the Arctic over the next century.

“It takes you from 1966 to global climate change and onward to the effects of Greenland’s melting,” Bierman said. “That’s pretty profound.”

“There are things we can learn about ice sheets that we can never learn from the ice itself,” he added. “It comes from the stuff below the ice.”

After the camp was decommissioned in 1967, the US military failed to remove the facility’s waste and infrastructure, assuming that it would eventually be entombed in Greenland’s ice sheet over the subsequent decades.

Though Camp Century now resides under nearly 100 feet of snow and ice, researchers took inventory of what was left behind and found nearly 136 acres of waste — about the size of 100 football fields. A 2016 study found that more than 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel, 63,000 gallons of sewage and radioactive coolant, thousands of gallons of wastewater, and an unknown amount of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) remained buried at the abandoned facility.

At the current melting rate of the Arctic, researchers estimate that the waste could resurface around 2100, releasing pollutants that pose a major threat to surrounding ecosystems and human health.

“Two generations ago, people were interring waste in different areas of the world, and now climate change is modifying those sites,” William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University and lead author of the study, said in a 2016 statement.

“Once the site transitions from net snowfall to net melt, it’s only a matter of time before the wastes melt out; it becomes irreversible,” he continued.

As the threat of biological, chemical, and radioactive waste looms, the question remains as to who is responsible for cleaning up the waste, from Camp Century and other abandoned US military facilities scattered throughout Greenland.

In 2018, Greenland and Denmark signed an agreement allocating 180 million Danish kroner — about $29 million — over six years to clean up some of the US military bases. In 2021, the cleanup efforts were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The US hasn’t formally taken responsibility to clean up its abandoned facilities. If Trump were to carry through on acquiring Greenland, the world’s largest island that is believed to be suffuse with valuable rare earth minerals, the US would contend directly with this looming environmental disaster.

Colgan told Politico there haven’t been any attempts to clean up Camp Century so far amid fears of disturbing the radioactive site too much.

“There is actually a conscious effort not to drill into the debris field,” he said. “We don’t actually know the full nature of what’s down there.”