Melting ice reveals a US military secret…and a long-forgotten military base

A forgotten relic of the Cold War era has re-emerged in the Arctic, the barren and frozen land around the North Pole, revealing what scientists describe as an environmental time bomb.

A once-classified US military nuclear launch site built ostensibly as a “research station”, the so-called Camp Century had remained buried beneath Greenland’s ice cap since the late 1960s.

But accelerated glacial melting has started exposing the long-buried and forgotten military site, revealing the dangers of its hazardous nuclear remnants.

The site concealed a secret military project known as Project Iceworm. The US Army had envisioned it as a potential base for intercontinental ballistic missiles, hidden beneath the ice to counter Soviet threats.

Though the facility was built in 1960 and decommissioned in 1967, large quantities of radioactive waste, toxic chemicals and diesel fuel were left behind, buried deep in what was then thought to be a permanent ice sheet, the permafrost.

But rising Arctic temperatures are melting away the protective ice. Pools of contaminated water have begun to surface, leaching pollutants into the surrounding environment.

Scientists warn that the thawing site could release radioactive materials and other toxins into Greenland’s ecosystem, potentially affecting local wildlife, nearby communities and the North Atlantic Ocean.

‘We didn’t know what it was at first’

A team of NASA engineers was flying over Greenland in April 2024 to observe the vast expanse of the ice sheet’s surface. That’s when the radar started beeping as it detected, unexpectedly, something buried within the ice.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”

Past airborne surveys over the decommissioned site detected signs of the base under the ice, with solid structures of the abandoned facility appearing like mere blips between the deformed layers of ice.

But the 2024 flights made “individual structures in the secret city” visible in a way that “they’ve never been seen before”.

What’s Century Camp?

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US Army Corps of Engineers constructed Camp Century beneath the ice sheet in northwest Greenland, using an extensive network of 26 interconnected tunnels stretching roughly three kilometres. It was nicknamed “the city under the ice”.

The facility was built to accommodate up to 200 personnel throughout the year and had the capacity to store as many as 600 medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles.

Due to its faraway location, the base relied on a nuclear reactor for its power supply.

The facility was part of a network of US nuclear launch sites that could withstand a first strike by the Soviet Union. But the US military realised within a decade that the ice sheet in Greenland was not “as stable as first thought”.

It never completed Camp Century, and the site was decommissioned in 1967.

US scientists believed in the 1960s that Greenland’s ice sheet would naturally handle all waste disposal. They considered efforts to manage the nuclear waste unnecessary, assuming the snow would bury and preserve the facility indefinitely.

As a result, instead of fully dismantling Camp Century, the US abandoned the military site and left behind “thousands of tonnes of waste, including radioactive material”.

Scientists have warned that liquid waste comprising approximately 200,000 litres of fossil fuel and 24 million litres of other wet waste, such as sewage left behind at the site, could permeate the ice sheet further as it degrades and enters the ocean.

New academic research has pointed out that these wastes can no longer be considered “preserved for eternity”.

“The potential remobilisation of wastes previously deemed sequestered represents a new pathway to political dispute due to climate change.”

Rising temperatures in Arctic

Temperatures in the Arctic are warming twice as fast as the global average. One reason is the melting of floating sea ice. It forms in winter and retreats in summer, which exposes deep blue waters that, in turn, absorb more solar energy than white ice does.

This speeds up the melting process in a positive-feedback loop, meaning it accelerates the response and makes the climate even warmer.

Research shows the Greenland ice shelves have lost 35 percent of their volume since 1978, and the ice loss is happening worryingly fast. The melting ice and the consequential rising sea level could accelerate the contamination from the trash left behind.

Camp Century is not the only abandoned military facility from the Cold War era in Greenland, a self-ruled island within Denmark.

The Greenland parliament has urged the US and Denmark governments to clean up as many as 30 rusting Cold War-era US military installations, saying it was “losing patience” over the risks of radioactive and chemical waste.