How Camp Century Soldiers Ate, Slept & Survived Under Greenland's Ice Beside a Nuclear Reactor

In 1959 and 1960, U.S. Army engineers cut a town into the snow of the Greenland ice cap, about 150 miles from Thule Air Base, and powered it with a portable nuclear reactor. Camp Century had a main trench called Main Street, 21 side trenches, plywood huts with no windows, a mess hall, a chapel that doubled as a theater, a library, a water well melted more than a hundred feet down into the ice, and the PM-2A reactor in the northeast corner. This film follows the men who lived there: the heavy swings that hauled everything across 138 miles of ice, the Peter plows from Switzerland, the steak from what the Army called the largest deep freeze in the world, the polar night, the night the reactor went critical at 06:52, the radiation in the snow walls and the ten-day radio blackout, the snow that squeezed the trenches by more than two feet a year, Project Iceworm, and what NASA's radar found under the ice in 2024. Chapters: 0:00 Camp Century, 1 October 1960 2:03 The Heavy Swing 5:23 The Peter Plow 8:42 Main Street 9:54 Steak To Fruit Salad 13:15 No Windows 15:41 Zero Six Fifty-two 20:13 A Day Under The Ice 22:17 Squeezed Out Of Existence 25:00 Project Iceworm 27:04 Out Pops Camp Century Sources (every number in the film is taken from these): Elmer F. Clark, Camp Century: Evolution of Concept and History of Design, Construction, and Performance, CRREL Technical Report 174 (1965) James W. Barnett, Final Report on the Construction of the PM-2A Nuclear Power Plant at Camp Century (Office of the Chief of Engineers, 1961) Austin Kovacs, Camp Century Revisited: A Pictorial View, June 1969 (CRREL, 1970), the 1969 photographs Herbert T. Ueda and Donald E. Garfield, Drilling Through the Greenland Ice Sheet, CRREL Special Report 126 (1968) Chester C. Langway Jr., The History of Early Polar Ice Cores, ERDC/CRREL TR-08-1 (2008) William Colgan et al., The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate, Geophysical Research Letters (2016); and the GEUS Bulletin note on the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Programme (2017) Kristian H. Nielsen, Henry Nielsen and Janet Martin-Nielsen, City under the Ice: The Closed World of Camp Century in Cold War Culture, Science as Culture (2014) NASA Earth Observatory, the UAVSAR radar image of Camp Century (flight April 2024, published 25 November 2024) Film (U.S. Army / National Archives, public domain): Research and Development Progress Report No. 6: Camp Century (1963); The Big Picture: City Under the Ice, The Big Picture: U.S. Army and the Boy Scouts, The Big Picture: Ice Cap; Icecap (DoD, 1965); Engineering for Tomorrow (1970); Army Scientists Drill Through Arctic Ice Cap (1966) Photographs and drawings: CRREL and Corps of Engineers reports, the PM-2A final report, Army Research and Development Newsmagazine and Army Information Digest (1960-61), National Archives, NASA, Natural Earth A few scenes of daily life where no photograph exists (the mess hall at night, the quarters, the radio room, the lead bricks) are reconstructions made from the Army's own photographs and film of those rooms; each carries the word RECONSTRUCTION on screen. Pictures of other places or years carry their place and year on screen. Photo credits (CC BY): Henrik thomsen at Danish Wikipedia (2 images) - CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Independent and educational. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Army or any armed force.