Iceworm Project in Grolândia
It will do a year since NASA found Camp Century, also known as “The City under the ice,” bringing out one of the most secret stories of the Cold War.
The remains of the former US military base were in the jerky depths of northwestern Grolândia, by NASA, which at the beginning “I didn’t even know what it was.” The base, built in 1959 by the US Army Engineers’ body, functioned as a military and scientific experience for a few years, and although if he knew his existence, recent images of the US space agency obtained by air radar gave us the first clear view of the underground structure.
Camp Century, seen by NASA with air radar.
Without knowing the true objective of the mission, Robert Weiss He was sent to the base in 1962, where he lived for almost a year. Only in the mid -1990s, when the information was disqualified, I learned that I had been working to install nuclear missiles in a project known as Iceworm.
“Uncle Sam sent me to sit under the ice at 800 miles (about 1,300 kilometers) from the North Pole,” he recalled this month.
The Century field consisted of a network of interconnected tunnels about 1.2 kilometers long, located several meters under the ice, with capacity for 200 people. It contained accommodation, a hospital, laboratories, a library, a chapel and leisure zones. The entire infrastructure was fed by the first portable nuclear reactor in the world, the PM-2A, a technological advance at the time. Investigators could spend up to six months at a time at a time, while soldiers were limited to four months.
Despite the inhospitable environment, Weiss describes a relatively comfortable life within the base, which had a capacity of 200 people. Their tunnels interconnected with about 1.2 kilometers in climatized, dry and well -stocked length; The water was removed from a steam drilled well, while the sewers were dumped into a hole excavated in the ice layer.
In his free time, Weiss studied, played chess or via movies in a makeshift room – and the canteen served Martinis for only ten cents.
“They told us that one of the main objectives was to demonstrate that an isolated installation could be safe and effectively fueled by nuclear energy. We thought it was safe and no one told us otherwise,” he says.
But not everything was a sea (ice cream) of roses. Shortly after operating, the nuclear reactor had security problems due to hazardous radiation levels, an incident that despite being corrected before Weiss’s arrival was a warning of latent risks on the facilities.
The structural wear caused by the growing instability of the ice and high maintenance costs led to the definitive closure of the base in 1967. The structures were abandoned and the reactor removed, but it is estimated that other biological, chemical and radioactive residues have been buried.
Recently, NASA played again in the wound. Although debris is currently in great depth and do not represent immediate danger, accelerated defrost due to climate change may, in the future, expose contaminating materials that remained hidden for over half a century.
“In new data, the individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way never seen before,” says Chad Greeneone of the NASA scientists who found the base with a powerful air radar.
“Without a detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how ice sheets will respond to rapid heating of the oceans and the atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to design sea level rise rates,” he said Alex Gardnerproject co-leader and also responsible for detecting the old base.
