The Military Science Research Base — Camp Century

Camp Century was a military science research base in Greenland in the Arctic the United States. It lies 150 km east of Thule Air Base. Army engineers had to build a three-mile road to supply the $8 million facilities to the 6,000 tons required. Camp Century construction began in June 1959 and finished in October 1960. Army engineers had to build a three-mile road to supply the $8 million facilities to the 6,000 tons required. The majority of the heavy equipment, including the vehicles, was provided by ” heavy swings “known as ” heavy swings.” The speeds of the heavy equipment were 2 miles per hour.

In the early 1960s, U.S. officials also considered Ice worm to be a way of splitting nuclear weapons under NATO auspices. At this time, some NATO leaders, especially France, wanted a contentious demand for the United States, given its long-standing policy of keeping nuclear secrets to be included in the U.S. British atomic sharing program. Ice worm suggested a potential solution to this problem because it ” is the strategic component of the NATO alliance” (85).

A Multi-Lateral Force (MLF), a NATO alliance of ships and submarines that would be armed with the United States was another American plan for this issue. The U.S. military remained limited in operations until 1966. Its tunnels collapsed rapidly and today, the camp century is almost unreachable, buried under a thick ice layer. The Ice worm Project remained a near secret until 1997. However, climate change experts have been predicting in recent years that the ice sheet will
melt sufficiently to expose Camp Century.

When was Camp Century last open?

When eight years of operation, Camp Century was decommissioned in 1967 after the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the idea. The Army Corps of Engineers removed the nuclear reactor core but left behind the camp’s infrastructure and all other trash, expecting the ice sheet to keep them safe longer.

The re-discovery of Camp Century’s foundational materials

They inventoried thousands of ice core boxes in 2017 and surprisingly rediscovered the samples. After then, they enlisted a group of scientists to conduct current analyses on these long-lost and one-of-a-kind samples. Perhaps, one from the upper-most and the other from the lower-most parts of the Camp Century sediment.
They yelled something along the lines of “Holy Schist!” as they examined them under a microscope. They saw some fragile twigs; leaf ends, and woody material in the mud. Moreover, they discovered. You can imagine our delight at finding something like that in sediment that had been covered by almost a kilometer of ice for a valuable period!

Moreover, they spotted tiny black specks floating in the rinse water when we sieved the material into different grain sizes for analyses. The discovery’s scientific significance was obvious: the presence of plant remains indicated that this area of northwestern Greenland was formerly ice-free and vegetated. But when did the ice melt, and what ecology arose in its place?