Why the US built Camp Century

In the summer of 1959, a group of American soldiers began carving trenches in the Greenland ice sheet. Those trenches would become the snow covered tunnels of Camp Century, a secret Arctic research base powered by a nuclear reactor.

Camp Century operated for six years, during which time the scientists based there managed to drilling a mile down to collect a unique set of ice cores. But by 1966, it had been abandoned, deemed too expensive and difficult to maintain.

Today, Donald Trump’s territorial ambitions for Greenland continue to cause concern and confusion in Europe, particularly for Denmark and Greenlanders themselves who insist their island is not for sale.

One of the attractions of Greenland is the gleam of its rich mineral wealth, particularly rare earth minerals. Now that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting due to global warming, will this make the mineral riches easier to get at?

In this episode, we talk to Paul Bierman, a geologist and expert on Greenland’s ice at the University of Vermont in US. He explains why the history of what happened to Camp Century – and the secrets of its ice cores, misplaced for decades, but now back under the microscope – help us to understand why it’s not that simple.

This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with editing help from Katie Flood. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

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• Why Greenland is indispensable to global climate science
• Greenland is rich in natural resources – a geologist explains why
• Greenland: Staying with the Polar Inuit. How a secret military base helped trigger the silent collapse of an Arctic world
• The US military has cared about climate change since the dawn of the Cold War – for good reason

Mentioned in this episode:

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