What began as a routine NASA radar survey over Greenland’s vast ice sheet in April 2024 turned into a discovery straight out of Cold War history. Beneath 100 feet of ice, scientists stumbled upon the remains of Camp Century, a once-secret U.S. military base built during the height of nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.
Once touted as the “city under the ice,” Camp Century was far more than a scientific outpost it was part of a covert plan, Project Iceworm, that aimed to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles beneath Greenland’s frozen surface. Now, decades later, the base and its legacy of radioactive waste are resurfacing—literally.
During a NASA flight over the Greenland Ice Sheet, scientist Chad Greene captured radar images that revealed unusual patterns beneath the surface. “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 (JPL). “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
Using Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), a technology that, unlike LiDAR’s light-based system, uses radio waves to peer through ice, NASA confirmed the find. Beneath the snow lay a relic of Cold War ambition: a buried network of tunnels, power systems, and forgotten nuclear waste.
Built secretly between 1959 and 1960 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Camp Century was a bold experiment in Arctic engineering. Constructed with 6,000 tons of material, the camp featured 21 tunnels stretching nearly 10,000 feet complete with living quarters, labs, and even a chapel.
It wasn’t easy to build. Workers faced temperatures as low as -70°F and winds reaching 125 mph, transporting supplies on heavy bobsleds that crawled across the ice at just two miles per hour.
The camp’s crown jewel was a PM-2A nuclear reactor, one of the first portable medium-power reactors in the world, designed to power the entire subterranean city. While the base was publicly presented as a site for “polar science,” the truth ran much deeper literally.
Behind the scientific cover lay a classified military ambition. The U.S. Army planned to use Camp Century as the prototype for Project Iceworm, a vast network of tunnels spanning 52,000 square miles large enough to hide 600 nuclear missiles targeted at the Soviet Union.
The scheme called for 60 launch centers and 11,000 personnel living beneath the ice, ready to strike from a frozen fortress. The Danish government, which technically controlled Greenland, was never informed.
However, the project’s flaws quickly became apparent. The shifting ice proved unstable, collapsing tunnels and damaging infrastructure. By 1967, the Army abandoned Camp Century, taking the reactor but leaving behind its radioactive waste. The full extent of Project Iceworm wasn’t revealed until 1997, when the Danish Institute of International Affairs declassified the plan.
Though the base is now entombed under decades of snowfall, its legacy lingers. According to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, the base produced more than 47,000 gallons of nuclear waste during its brief 33-month operation. That waste remains frozen below the ice at least for now.
Climate change could soon expose it. A 2016 study led by William Colgan, a glaciologist at York University, warned that the ice covering Camp Century could begin melting by 2090, releasing hazardous materials into the environment.
“They thought it would never be exposed,” Colgan told The Guardian. “Back then, in the ’60s, the term global warming had not even been coined. But the climate is changing, and the question now is whether what’s down there is going to stay down there.”