A Top Secret Cold War Project Reveals Climate Crisis Clues

The adapted oil rig in Camp Century (Source: Atomic Heritage Foundation)

In May 1959, the US initiated the construction of an ice base, Camp Century, in northwest Greenland. Framed as a scientific project to test snow tunneling tech, in reality, it had military motives: the Iceworm system, a way to hide 600 nuclear missiles trained toward the Soviet Union, which would be in constant motion by snow rail tunnels under northern Greenland. And close to the Soviet Union.

Project Iceworm was never built. The ice’s shifting nature and unsuitability for housing nuclear facilities posed significant challenges, rendering the endeavor impractical. Iceworm was abandoned, and Camp Century was shut down in 1966 due to structural vulnerabilities.

But before the closure, researchers actually succeeded in the scientific smokescreen, drilling deep ice cores. Only in 2018, their sediment, initially overlooked, was rediscovered in cookie jars of a University of Copenhagen freezer. And yielded a remarkable scientific breakthrough.

Camp Century’s location. Greenland ice cores and basal materials. (A) Ice core locations (circles) and analyses of basal materials (symbols).

An Iceless Past

In this underground cavern beneath layers of snow and ice, scientists were perfecting a revolutionary method to uncover Earth’s history. These glaciologists believed the ice sheet was like a frozen archive, storing ancient events and temperatures in an encrypted code. By drilling into the ice and extracting a core sample, scientists could access vital information about the past. The deeper the drilling, the further back in time they could venture.

A multimillion-year-old record of Greenland vegetation and glacial history preserved in sediment beneath 1.4 km of ice at Camp Century

Chet Langway, the geologist overseeing the analysis of these ice cores at Camp Century, reminisces about the project’s early days: “The army allowed us to freeload with them.”

This collaboration was crucial, as Langway and his team pursued the serious goal of reaching…