Public entries tagged #greenland

“THE FIRST ATTEMPT to drill through the Greenland ice sheet was made in the early nineteen-sixties at a U.S. Army outpost called Camp Century. Some fifty years later, the camp remains far and away the biggest thing ever built on—or, really, under the Greenland ice. Camp Century had a bar, a chapel, a barbershop, a movie theater, and a nuclear reactor. All were housed in a network of snow tunnels like those at EGRIP [the East Greenland Ice-Core Project], but extending for miles. The ostensible purpose of the base was to promote Arctic science, but in the nineteen-nineties an investigation by the Danish government revealed this to be a ruse. What the army had really been up to was developing a new system for storing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its plan was to install a subglacial railway and shuttle ICBMs around in a Cold War shell game. The code name for the scheme was Project Iceworm.” - A passage from the chapter, A Song of Ice Greenland Is Melting from the book, Life On A Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert (2025) which I am reading.

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