A secret nuclear city was built under Greenland's ice by the USA. In 1967, it was abandoned but something dangerous got left behind

In the 1960s, the US military built an underground base under Greenland’s vast ice sheet, complete with living quarters, a nuclear reactor and tunnels carved through the frozen landscape. Named Camp Century, it was presented as a scientific research facility, but it was also linked to a secret plan to position hundreds of nuclear missiles against the Soviet Union.

The military fully abandoned the base in 1967, taking its reactor with it but leaving behind waste and other materials buried beneath the ice. Decades later, the discovery of the base’s remains by NASA researchers raised a question that what happens if Greenland’s ice no longer keeps the abandoned site sealed away?

NASA rediscovers buried military base

In April 2024, NASA scientists detected the remains of Camp Century during an aircraft flight over Greenland. Using advanced radar technology, the team identified structures buried roughly 100 feet beneath the ice sheet.


According to NASA Earth Observatory, the researchers had been studying the ice beneath the surface when they came across these structures.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn't know what it was at first,” Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said.

Camp Century was constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers between 1959 and 1960. It contained a network of tunnels and buildings designed to accommodate military personnel and scientists in one of the world's harshest environments.

Secret plan to place nuclear missiles under ice

Although the US military openly presented Camp Century as a research facility, its scientific purpose hid a more ambitious military plan.

Known as Project Iceworm, the proposal envisioned a network of tunnels beneath Greenland’s ice sheet that would allow the US to deploy and move hundreds of ballistic missiles capable of targeting the Soviet Union.

The plan was for a huge underground network, thousands of miles long, and able to hold up to 600 missiles. The missiles would have provided the US with a potential nuclear strike capability during the Cold War.

However, the project never progressed to the planned missile network. Engineers realised that the constantly shifting ice made it impossible to maintain the tunnels and structures needed for such an operation.

The base itself also faced serious problems. Snow accumulating above the underground buildings exerted pressure on their roofs, while heat from the facilities weakened the surrounding ice. Maintaining the tunnels became increasingly difficult.

Camp Century was eventually abandoned in 1967. The true military ambitions behind Project Iceworm became publicly known decades later, following the release of information about the plan in 1997.

What the US left behind

Removing the nuclear reactor did not mean that the site was completely cleared. According to research cited by Popular Mechanics, the abandoned camp contained nuclear waste as well as other potentially hazardous materials.

The reactor had operated for 33 months and generated more than 47,000 gallons of nuclear waste, according to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. Although the reactor was removed when the base closed, the waste was left behind beneath the ice.

Other materials, including diesel fuel, sewage and toxic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were also left at the site, according to reporting by author Jon Gertner in The Ice at the End of the World.

At the time, officials expected the waste to remain permanently buried as snow continued accumulating over the abandoned base.

That assumption has become a big concern as Greenland's ice sheet has been prone to a warming climate.

Could melting ice expose the waste?

In a study discussed in 2016, William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at Canada's York University, warned that climate change could eventually undermine the assumption that Camp Century would remain buried forever.

“They thought it would never be exposed,” Colgan said, referring to the expectations held when the base was abandoned.

A study led by Colgan projected that the site could begin losing ice by 2090, raising questions about the long-term fate of the waste.

The timeline remains a projection rather than a certainty, and the discovery of the buried structures does not mean the waste is about to emerge.