I'd stumbled across Camp Century via the propaganda video posted on YouTube describing the project. My first thought was "this is not in fact a scientific mission". I was both right and wrong.<p>Right in that the cover story of "scientific exploration" was clearly bullshit. The mission was to test the viability of deploying nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles under the ice sheet.<p>But wrong in that, as the <i>actual</i> mission proved utterly infeasible (as Gallileo might have said of glacial ice, "she moves"), it turned out that the science of determining the suitability of ice for nuclear annihilation purposes ... proved to be damned good and immensely valuable science.<p>(Science often piggy-backs on other activities --- astronomy on military activities, geology on coal and oil prospecting and extraction, to give two examples.)<p>The ice cores in which 700,000 -- 1.4 million year-old plant life were found at the bottom of a mile-deep glacial cover, showing that Greenland <i>can</i> in fact melt completely with minimal average global temperature change, in the news recently, came from Camp Century.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487457" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487457</a>
Camp Century was nuclear power research base in Greenland and was a cover-up for a Project Iceworm whose end goal was to install a vast network of nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. This video shows the audacity of this project in 1960 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28NYczAuXl4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28NYczAuXl4</a>). It was ultimately abandoned as ice conditions were not as stable as initially projected. Nuclear waste and Biohazard created by this site has become an environmental concern with the melting of the ice sheet.