How A Top-Secret Cold War Experiment Warned Us About the Climate Crisis

Scientists dug for missiles — but instead predicted a looming collapse

Old photo from the construction of Camp Century on the Greenland Ice Sheet (circa 1961–63) in an old CRREL report (Source: Drew Christ, Climate Scientist)

It is May 1959. The wind howls across Greenland’s ice sheet, a vast, frozen expanse that has held its breath for millennia. In this silence, broken only by the rhythmic grind of drilling rigs, a team of U.S. soldiers and scientists burrows into a world older than humanity itself. They are not searching for history — they are building a future. A hidden fortress, a ghost city beneath the ice, where nuclear missiles could lie in wait, unseen and untouchable, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.

On the surface, Camp Century is presented as a scientific outpost, an experiment in Arctic survival and engineering. But beneath the snow, the true purpose is far more sinister: Project Iceworm, a plan to carve out a labyrinth of tunnels that would house 600 nuclear warheads, their positions shifting with the ice, making them nearly impossible for the Soviet Union to track.

But the ice has its own agenda. It shifts, it groans, it resists. The dream of a subterranean nuclear arsenal collapses under the weight of its own impossibility. By 1966, Camp Century is abandoned, left to be swallowed by the very ice that was meant to conceal it.