Camp Century

Camp Century was a Cold War-era United States Army base built in 1959 beneath the surface of the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet, and later abandoned in 1967 with thousands of tons of physical, chemical, and radiological waste left in place. It is now a canonical case study in how climate change can remobilize waste that was assumed to be permanently sequestered — what Colgan et al. (2016) call “an entirely new pathway of political dispute resulting from climate change.”

The base and Project Iceworm

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century in 1959–1960 about 240 km from Thule Air Base, under the 1951 U.S.–Danish Defense of Greenland Agreement. Publicly it was a demonstration of under-ice construction techniques and polar science (it hosted the world’s first portable nuclear reactor, the ALCO-built PM-2A, which powered the camp from 1960 to 1963). In reality it was the cover project for the top-secret Project Iceworm: a plan, revealed by declassified documents obtained by the Danish Institute for International Studies in 1996, to deploy up to 600 nuclear-tipped “Iceman” missiles (modified Minutemen) in a 4,000 km tunnel network spanning ~52,000 square miles of ice cap — a second-strike force hidden from Soviet targeting. Danish consent for nuclear deployment was never actually obtained.

Ice core measurements quickly showed the glacier was moving far faster than the engineers assumed; tunnels deformed visibly within a few years (the reactor-room ceiling dropped 5 feet by mid-1962). The PM-2A was shut down in 1963 and removed in 1964; Iceworm was cancelled and Camp Century abandoned with minimal decommissioning in 1966–1967, on the explicit assumption that perpetual net snow accumulation would entomb everything “for eternity.” The 21-tunnel network (~3 km total) left behind buildings, railways, diesel fuel tanks, radioactive coolant water, and an unknown quantity of PCBs.

Climate-driven remobilization (Colgan et al. 2016)

Colgan, Machguth, MacFerrin, Colgan, van As, and MacGregor (Geophysical Research Letters, 2016) produced the first inventory of the abandoned wastes and modeled the site’s surface mass balance (SMB) under RCP 8.5 (“business as usual”) forcing:

• The tunnel network covers ~55 ha; most solid waste was buried ~36 m deep as of 2016, projected to sit at ~67 m (solid) and ~93 m (liquid) depth by 2090.
• A regional climate model (MAR3.5) forced by CanESM2 projects the site transitioning from net accumulation to net ablation around 2090; a NorESM1-forced run keeps positive SMB through 2100 but still shows substantial inland migration of the equilibrium line. The CanESM2-forced hindcast matches observed SMB better.
• Once ablation begins, waste exposure is a matter of decades-to-centuries of melt; but PCBs and other soluble toxins can be remobilized decades earlier by meltwater percolating through firn into the englacial aquifer and flowing down hydraulic gradient toward proglacial ecosystems.

The authors frame the political significance explicitly: the bases were legally established under treaty, but no treaty assigns liability for waste that melting ice returns to the world. Camp Century thus prefigures a broader class of disputes over legacy waste sites (military and civilian) exposed by sea-level rise and cryospheric change — a multigenerational, multinational problem with no ready legal instrument. Cleanup is effectively impossible now (too much ice) and will be treacherous later (a thawing ice sheet).

Scientific afterlife

Ironically, Camp Century’s deepest legacy may be scientific rather than military: the first ice core to penetrate an ice sheet was drilled there in 1966, along with ~3.5 m of frozen sub-glacial soil. Re-analysis of that long-forgotten soil (Bierman et al., work publicized in the 2020s) found leaves, twigs, mosses, and insects — evidence that northwestern Greenland was ice-free within roughly the last 400,000 years, implying the ice sheet is far more sensitive to warming than once assumed.

Related

• limits-to-growth — another instance of long-horizon consequences of mid-20th-century industrial assumptions colliding with Earth-system constraints
• malthusianism — contrasting frame for resource/sink limits; Camp Century is a “saturated waste sink” story rather than a resource-depletion story
• intergenerational-equity-litigation — legal mechanisms for exactly the kind of cross-generational environmental liability Camp Century raises

Sources

• Colgan et al. (2016) — The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate
• Camp Century — Nuclear Museum (Atomic Heritage Foundation)
• 1965 — CRREL Technical Report 174 — Camp Century
• 2025 — The U.S. built a covert Cold War base under a Greenland glacier — National Geographic