The $8 Million American Nuclear-Powered Base Buried Under The Greenland Ice Sheet

In 1959, the U.S. Army built Camp Century under the Greenland ice sheet, powered by a portable nuclear reactor and designed to test housing missiles. Built for $8 million between 1959 and 1960 under the Defense of Greenland Agreement with Denmark, the camp housed up to 200 personnel in cut-and-cover trenches powered by a portable PM-2A nuclear reactor. Publicly presented as a research station, Camp Century was tied to Project Iceworm, a classified plan to deploy 600 medium-range ballistic missiles on rails through tunnels under the ice. The ice compressed faster than Army engineers expected, closing the trenches at thirty inches per year, and the missile plan was never built. The camp was abandoned in 1967, but its waste remains under the ice, now monitored by a Danish-Greenlandic program that projects no surface exposure before 2100. The site also produced the first ice core to penetrate a full ice sheet, drilling 4,550 feet to bedrock and recovering a climate record spanning 120,000 years.