An Abandoned Arctic Military Base Just Spilled a Scientific Secret

In 1959, the United States began construction of a real-life version of the frozen Echo Base from The Empire Strikes Back. The plan for Camp Century was to test snow tunneling technologies in northwest Greenland, not far from the north pole, ostensibly for scientific research. Really, the US was flexing its military muscle, and may have been considering Project Iceworm, a way to hide 600 nuclear missiles in thousands of miles of snow tunnels across northern Greenland, close to the former Soviet Union. The island’s massive ice sheet had other ideas for Camp Century, though—ice shifts and flows, making this not a particularly ideal place to stash nukes or run the nuclear reactor that powered the base.

Iceworm never went anywhere, and the US closed Camp Century in 1966, leaving the tunnels to collapse. But before everyone fled, researchers did manage to dig up some actual scientific dirt, drilling a 4,550-foot-deep core into the ice sheet. When they hit earth, they drilled a further 12 feet, bringing up a plug of frozen sand, dirty ice, cobbles, and mud. The military moved that ice core from its own freezers to the University at Buffalo in the 1970s. The core ended up in Denmark in the '90s, where it was kept frozen, so that now it provides scientists with invaluable insight into ice ages past.

Nobody cared much about the sediment, though, until 2018, when it was rediscovered in cookie jars in a University of Copenhagen freezer. Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed that sediment, and made a major scientific discovery.

“In that frozen sediment are leaf fossils and little bits of bugs and twigs and mosses that tell us in the past there was a tundra ecosystem living where today there's almost a mile of ice,” says University of Vermont geoscientist Paul Bierman, coauthor of a new paper describing the finding in the journal Science. “The ice sheet is fragile. It can disappear, and it has disappeared. Now we have a date for that.”