The official story was that it was a base camp for scientific research under the name Camp Century, big enough to hold 200 residents.
But there was a top secret component that wasn't revealed until later: a planned base for nuclear missiles called "Project Iceworm." A vintage film shows how they built it.
(Link to YouTube)
What the planners didn't anticipate was that glacial ice is in constant motion, and any trenches or tunnels would eventually fill themselves in, trapping all the building materials and toxic waste under the ice, where it remains abandoned today.
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Read more
NPR: Melting ice in Greenland could expose serious pollutants from buried army base.
Exploring Greenland: Science and Technology in Cold War Settings
2 comments:
Fascinating. Enjoyed the “cutaway view” artwork. A sentence early in the film sums up the hubris of our species: “Man’s unceasing struggle to conquer his environment.”
It's almost unbelievable someone actually tried to build this. I thought such projects were confined to science fiction.
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