California scientists accidentally find nuclear fever dream in Arctic snow

NASA’s April 2024 expedition to the Greenland Ice Sheet was supposed to play out like every other geological research mission.

At the time, scientist Chad Greene was soaring above the barren landscape in a Gulfstream III, a small aircraft previously used to transport astronauts returning from Kazakhstan to Houston after completing various space missions. The coder and satellite specialist, along with a team of engineers, was closely monitoring the radar as it mapped the 1,380-mile-long terrain’s hidden, icy layers.

But when they took a photo, they noticed something unusual: a cluster of turquoise dots in a vast expanse of noisy black nothingness that beckoned to them like a siren song.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a scientist at NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a Nov. 25 news release. Though it’s been well documented over the years, their data — captured by an Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar attached to the belly of the aircraft — revealed the lost structure in a way that’s never been seen before.

“You can see the scale, you can see the size of it, you can see individual structures and tunnels,” Greene told SFGATE on Monday. “Really amazing.” The fact that they stumbled across it at all, especially while navigating severe weather conditions leading up to the flight, made their discovery even more remarkable.

Because the environment was so extreme and unpredictable, the research team developed about 25 different flight plans, Greene told SFGATE. As conditions slowly worsened, the scientists anxiously wondered whether they’d be able to collect data at all. But, against these odds, they were finally able to take flight in late April, embarking on a Herculean mission that had been three years in the making — and they just so happened to stumble across a forgotten relic of the Cold War in the process.

Part research facility, part war machine, the clandestine, underground military site once housed up to 200 soldiers and scientists who dutifully studied ice core samples during the height of the Cold War. The nuclear-powered operation, complete with an experimental subsurface railway ultimately designed to help launch 600 missiles and provide year-round accommodations for its personnel, was supposed to be entombed in snow for eternity after authorities decommissioned it in 1967.

But the bones of “Project Iceworm” may soon reemerge, as scientists worry that global warming will exhume its toxic waste, leading to grave environmental consequences.

Built 125 miles inland from the island’s coast in 1959 and located 100 feet below the surface, the secret bunker was originally designed to test the feasibility of launching nuclear missiles from the Arctic, the closest pathway between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The only problem, however, was that U.S. officials didn’t exactly have permission to build the so-called “city under the ice.”

During Cold War tensions, the Danes only allowed the U.S. to construct military bases in designated areas in Greenland, such as an Air Force base and a defense area in the northwest of the country. But, during a cocktail party in August of 1959, Danish Minister for Foreign Affairs Jens Otto Krag was horrified to learn that the Americans were secretly digging tunnels deep in the Greenland Ice Sheet using thermal drills, according to a historical article on the era published in ScienceNordic magazine.

The decision to move forward with the audacious project was a “dreadful blunder,” American Ambassador Val Peterson recalled. As Danish authorities scrambled to craft a careful public narrative surrounding the nuclear operation, journalists visited the underground site, only to be restricted by officials.

But, ultimately, a third world war never came, and the U.S. government’s need for a nuclear reactor in Greenland was never realized.

Authorities rejected Project Iceworm in 1963, and year-round operations shut down one year later. By 1967, it was decommissioned entirely. As a result, the site — along with its 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, 24,000,000 liters of biological waste, and 1.2 million units of radioactive waste — was left behind, forever buried in the snow.

Or so everyone thought.

Decades after it was abandoned, numerous scientists have come forward citing the dangers that Camp Century poses to the region’s aquatic ecosystem and multibillion-dollar resources.

“Not only would it contaminate a large swath of centuries old ice that holds a plethora of scientific data, it would also pose the risk of making its way out to sea and contaminating a diverse ecosystem,” a 2016 article from Michigan State University reads. In addition, researchers believe the site is likely just one of many that pose such a threat in our warming world.

“The sheer imagination, will power and funding to embark on the creation of Camp Century was incredible,” Gardner told SFGATE. “And I wish we were able to replicate that for some of the things that concern our future Earth.”