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Camp Century, Greenland, Project Iceworm: "City Under the Ice" 1961 US Army; The Big Picture TV-514
🕑 Added 2020-03-30 20:34:18 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
'The first release of the 1961-1962 THE BIG PICTURE series tells the story of a research and development project undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Greenland. This city under the ice cap referred to as Camp Century, is a new concept of polar construction. It is today's Modern Army in action on a new frontier of solid ice and snow. During this 30-minute presentation, you will see how snowy wastelands are developed into a completely built city equipped with every convenience from a nuclear power plant to a shower. Camp Century is an important element in the Army's continuing polar research program. "City Under the Ice" is an outstanding example of man's never ceasing quest for knowledge.'
Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Project Iceworm was the code name for a top secret United States Army program of the Cold War, which aimed to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. The ultimate objective of placing medium-range missiles under the ice — close enough to strike targets within the Soviet Union — was kept secret from the Government of Denmark. To study the feasibility of working under the ice, a highly publicized "cover" project, known as Camp Century, was launched in 1960. Unstable ice conditions within the ice sheet caused the project to be canceled in 1966...
To test the feasibility of construction techniques a project site called "Camp Century" was started by the United States military, located at an elevation of 6,600 feet (2,000 m) in northwestern Greenland, 150 miles (240 km) from the American Thule Air Base.[3][4] The radar and air base at Thule had already been in active use since 1951.
Camp Century was described at the time as a demonstration of affordable ice-cap military outposts. The secret Project Iceworm was to be a system of tunnels 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) in length, used to deploy up to 600 nuclear missiles, that would be able to reach the Soviet Union in case of nuclear war. The missile locations would be under the cover of Greenland's ice sheet and were supposed to be periodically changed. While Project Iceworm was secret, plans for Camp Century were discussed with and approved by the Kingdom of Denmark, and the facility, including its nuclear power plant, was profiled in The Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1960.
The "official purpose" of Camp Century, as explained by the United States Department of Defense to Danish government officials in 1960, was to test various construction techniques under Arctic conditions, explore practical problems with a semi-mobile nuclear reactor, as well as supporting scientific experiments on the icecap. A total of 21 trenches were cut and covered with arched roofs within which prefabricated buildings were erected.[6] With a total length of 3,000 metres (1.9 mi), these tunnels also contained a hospital, a shop, a theater and a church. The total number of inhabitants was around 200. From 1960 until 1963 the electricity supply was provided by means of the world's first mobile/portable nuclear reactor, designated PM-2A and designed by Alco for the U.S. Army. Water was supplied by melting glaciers and tested to determine whether germs such as the plague were present.
Within three years after it was excavated, ice core samples taken by geologists working at Camp Century demonstrated that the glacier was moving much faster than anticipated and would destroy the tunnels and planned launch stations in about two years. The facility was evacuated in 1965, and the nuclear generator removed. Project Iceworm was canceled, and Camp Century closed in 1966...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Air_Base
Thule Air Base, or Thule Air Base/Pituffik Airport (IATA: THU, ICAO: BGTL), is the United States Air Force's northernmost base, located 1,207 km (750 mi) north of the Arctic Circle and 1,524 km (947 mi) from the North Pole on the northwest coast of the island of Greenland.
Thule Air Base is the US Armed Forces' northernmost installation...
Thule Air Base is home to the 21st Space Wing's global network of sensors providing missile warning, space surveillance and space control to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Air Force Space Command (AFSPC)...
