The Secret Town under Greenland’s Ice: Camp Century
Beneath Greenland’s massive ice sheet lies the remains of Camp Century, a secret U.S. Army base built during the Cold War for nuclear research, forgotten by most today.
In the late 1950s, as tensions with the Soviet Union ran high, the United States sought innovative ways to maintain a strategic advantage. One of the boldest experiments of the era took place not in the skies or at sea, but hidden beneath the ice cap of northwest Greenland. Known as Camp Century, it was officially described as a scientific research outpost, but its true objectives and technological ambitions have remained largely unknown to the public even decades later.
Construction on Camp Century began in 1959. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used massive trenching machines to carve out a series of tunnels and chambers beneath nearly 30 feet of packed snow and ice, ultimately creating a labyrinthine mini-city that boasted living quarters, labs, a kitchen, hospital, rodent-filled science labs, even a chapel and recreation center. The most ambitious feature was its power source: a portable nuclear reactor, one of the earliest ever built.
Though ostensibly for polar research, Camp Century had a hidden military purpose. The Pentagon envisioned it as a prototype for “Project Iceworm,” a sprawling web of hundreds of miles of ice tunnels to secretly house intermediate-range nuclear missiles within striking distance of the USSR. The logic was unique: Greenland’s thick, shifting ice would provide cover and mobility, making missile locations hard to pinpoint or destroy. If successful, a network of these bases would be nearly impossible for an enemy to neutralize in a first strike, offering the U.S. a powerful new deterrent.
Yet the project ran into daunting natural obstacles almost immediately. The ice sheet, while appearing stable, was constantly moving and deforming, causing tunnels to buckle and collapse faster than engineers could reinforce them. The portable nuclear reactor, designated PM-2A, powered Camp Century efficiently but raised long-term environmental concerns. In just a few years, it became clear the base could not be maintained, let alone expanded to support hundreds of packed missile silos. In 1967, the U.S. abandoned Camp Century, quietly withdrawing the reactor and abandoning most of the facility along with thousands of tons of waste.
For years, the true intentions behind Camp Century and Project Iceworm remained highly classified, with only a few public references to its existence as a scientific station. The Danish government, which has sovereignty over Greenland, was officially informed only about the research aspects—not the nuclear reactor or military ambitions, sparking later controversy when details emerged in declassified documents.
Today, the remains of Camp Century lie entombed beneath Greenland’s shifting ice, nearly a mile from the surface due to decades of accumulating snow. Scientists now worry that as the ice sheet melts due to climate change, the buried toxic and radioactive waste from the camp—including PCBs, fuel, and low-level nuclear material—may one day be exposed, threatening delicate Arctic ecosystems and communities.
The story of Camp Century remains scarcely known to the public, even though it embodies a remarkable intersection of Cold War fear, technological ingenuity, and environmental risk. Hidden from sight for generations, the frozen remnants of America’s secret city under the ice are a poignant reminder of history’s buried secrets, and the lasting legacy of seemingly forgotten experiments.
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