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Deep in Greenland’s frozen wilderness, a radioactive secret sleeps beneath the ice — and it could be a headache for Donald Trump if the U.S. president-elect follows through on his threat to take control of the vast Arctic island.
Its name is Camp Century, an American military base built in 1959 during the Cold War in an attempt to develop nuclear launch sites that could survive a Russian strike.
The project, which involved carving a network of tunnels through Greenland’s ice sheet and was powered by a small nuclear reactor, was deemed unfeasible due to the constantly shifting ice and abandoned in 1967.
Although the Americans dismantled the reactor and took its nuclear reaction chamber with them when they departed in ’67, they left behind thousands of tonnes of waste and debris — including radioactive residue — to be buried under the icecap forever.
But thanks to climate change, forever might come sooner than planned.
As the world warms, Camp Century — which is located in one of the most remote spots on Earth, about 1,500 kilometers north of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital city — has been the focus of renewed interest and anxiety about just how long it will remain entombed. A landmark study published in 2016 found the remains of the abandoned base could be exposed by melting ice and snow toward the end of the 21st century.
“Our study highlights that Camp Century now possesses unanticipated political significance in light of anthropogenic climate change,” the researchers wrote (though they later revised their findings in 2021 to rule out the base reemerging from the ice until at least 2100).
The revelation caused a political storm in Greenland, a Danish territory which has been self-ruling since 1979.
Greenlandic Foreign Minister Vittus Qujaukitsoq demanded Denmark take responsibility for cleaning up the debris from abandoned U.S. military installations in Greenland, of which there are 20 to 30 mainly disused sites. Greenland, formerly a colony of Denmark, never consented to hosting them.
Nuuk and Copenhagen signed a deal in 2017 earmarking about $30 million to clean up the debris and waste — but Camp Century was not included in the agreement.
Greenlanders are “concerned that [Camp Century] will pollute as the ice melts down,” said Pipaluk Lynge, an MP from Greenland’s largest party and chair of the parliamentary foreign policy committee.
But it’s not just Camp Century, she added, referring to the other abandoned bases. “There are many places where [they] have left tons of dump,” she told POLITICO. “The U.S. has military waste all over the Arctic.”
‘Don’t poke it’
There have so far been “no attempts” to clean up Camp Century’s radioactive and toxic waste, said William Colgan, professor of glaciology and climate at the Geological Survey of Denmark who led the 2016 study into the ice surrounding Camp Century.
While Colgan did once drill deep into the site to test its radioactivity at the Danish health ministry’s request, “There is actually a conscious effort not to drill into the debris field,” he told POLITICO. “We don’t actually know the full nature of what’s down there.”
Camp Century has been described as a subterranean city, complete with a chapel, a barbershop and dormitories that once housed hundreds of people. To construct it, equipment and supplies were transported across the ice on sleds and tractor-trailers from nearby Pituffik Space Base, the northernmost U.S. military installation in the world, which is still active today.
In a 1961 report on American broadcaster CBS, TV legend Walter Cronkite visited the military base. His program filmed Camp Century’s massive ice tunnels being dug and showed U.S. army engineers relaxing in their underground, nuclear-powered barracks, reading and listening to records.
All that is now buried under thick layers of ice. Colgan said he and his team of researchers had been unable to find parts of Camp Century, such as its fuel depot, and feared disturbing it too much. “It’s cold, it’s deep, don’t poke it,” he said.
There are different ways Camp Century could contaminate the environment. One is if melting ice and snow carry toxic waste — such as the 200,000 liters of diesel fuel beneath the ice, according to Colgan — out into the ocean. Another is if the ice containing the base breaks off and forms an iceberg. Neither are likely anytime this century; while the latter would likely take thousands of years.
But the timeline shifts a little depending on how much the world warms in the coming decades. While there are different projections, a United Nations report published last October found the planet will heat up by 2.6 to 3.1 degrees Celsius this century, with no chance of limiting the temperature increase to the totemic 1.5 C target agreed in Paris in 2015.
“It’s a game of just a couple of degrees,” Colgan said. “2 or 3 C is the difference between Camp Century staying under ice or melting out.”
Climate change in microcosm
Camp Century itself was pivotal to scientists’ understanding of climate change. In the 1960s, scientists extracted an ice core there, a frozen soil sample that is still studied to this day for insights into climate patterns hundreds of thousands of years ago. The base remains a scientific “supersite,” said Colgan, who visits it annually along with many other climate researchers.
If the U.S. were to lay claim to the island — as Trump has repeatedly said it should do, calling American control of Greenland an “absolute necessity” and even threatening to use military force — it would also inherit the legacy of its own Cold War-era polluting activities at Camp Century.
“Camp Century is a microcosm of climate change,” Colgan argued. “People today are left picking up and trying to understand the climate impacts of decisions made 50 years ago, 60 years ago.”
And with the U.S. currently the second-biggest emitter of planet-warming emissions in the world, Camp Century and its “shifting fate” aren’t just a fascinating slice of Cold War trivia, but a story of climate action and responsibility today, he added.
“It is the decisions being made in the next decade or two that will put us on these trajectories that have multi-century implications,” Colgan warned.
