In April last year, a NASA-led jet flew over Greenland with one goal in mind: to map the depths of the ice in that area. Inside the plane was a team of specialized scientists and the most advanced radar in the entire NASA agency. This mission was led by glacier experts Chad Greene and Alex Gardner. They wanted to better understand the bedrock beneath the ice sheet in order to study sea levels. However, at a certain point, the radar stopped picking up rock and the ancient… Instead, it detected a geometric anomaly buried 100 feet below the surface.
Thankfully, they didn’t come face to face with Cthulhu or any other monster from hell straight out of H. P. Lovecraft’s imagination.
However, they did encounter something slightly —only slightly— less disturbing: a network of tunnels and orderly structures that could not have been created naturally. They had stumbled upon Camp Centur, a city under the ice that had been abandoned and forgotten decades earlier. NASA had gone to investigate nature, but instead had stumbled upon a forgotten chapter of the Cold War. Camp Century operated between 1959 and 1967 and was a military experiment that was both questionable and chilling. Yes, the US military had bases even in the Arctic itself. If you have a military veteran grandfather who hates the basement in winter, you might to start to suspect something.
The Secret City found by NASA
First, we must go back to the 1960s. This was the height of political tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War was essentially a constant arms race in which each country sought the best strategic positions. This is how Come Century came to light. The US military publicly presented the base as an outpost for polar scientific research. And so it was: scientists there managed to drill the first deep ice cores, a crucial technology for modern climatology. However, that was only the excuse.
This research laboratory was nothing more than a cover for the real mission: Project Iceworm. It was a top-secret plan to build a massive underground network of 4,000 km of tunnels and trenches. (To give us an idea, the catacombs of Paris, which is the most famous underground network in the world, are estimated to have a total length of approximately 300 km.) The ultimate goal was to store and deploy up to 600 nuclear ballistic missiles under the ice, ready to be launched at any moment against the USSR.
This plan was so sensitive that it was not even disclosed to the Danish government, which then controlled Greenland. It was quite an achievement to be able to hide a base with 21 main tunnels, with a central corridor that became known as “Main Street.”
This top-secret military base functioned as a bunker in the Fallout universe; to operate in such an extreme environment, a portable nuclear reactor, the PM-2A, was installed. This power source was much more efficient than transporting large quantities of diesel fuel.
However, the designers of the military base did not take into account something crucial: the ice sheet in Greenland is not static, but rather a gigantic moving glacier. It moves very slowly… but it does move. This constant flow of ice compression was their downfall, as the tunnels began to deform and collapse earlier than expected. Soon the Iceworm Project was deemed unfeasible, and the base was closed and abandoned in 1967.
Nuclear Waste
When they withdrew, the army took the precaution of removing the expensive PM-2A nuclear reactor. However, they thought that the rest of the infrastructure and waste would gradually be covered by accumulated ice.
They thought it would remain buried and sealed for eternity. However, with global warming, the waste appears to be a toxic bomb, as it is gradually rising to the surface. Although they took the nuclear reactor with them, they left behind approximately 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel, 63,000 gallons of wastewater, not to mention highly toxic chemicals used in construction materials. If we can learn anything from Camp Century, it is that problems are never solved by burying them… ’cause NASA will later find out!