Camp Century is an old military base in Greenland that is buried more than 20 feet below the icy ground. The site was built as a nuclear testing facility and to house U.S. army troops back in the 1960s but was abandoned in 1967.
The complex is located underground and consists of a series of interconnecting tunnels. The abandonment of the facility may have had something to do with the fact that it was built without the direct permission of the government in Denmark. Camp Century consisted of several housing units, a movie theatre, a store, and a hospital.
Petrified Fossils
Researchers in Antarctica spent an entire year scaling the icy mountains looking for clues to something they knew existed in the area long before all of the ice covered the entire continent: forests. The entirety of the land that today is a barren tundra used to be filled with luscious green life.
After the trip, they had 13 fossils from some of the ancient trees. And they dated back over 250 million years ago. One scientist who went along on the trip said that the samples are “some of the best-preserved” of their kind in the entire world. A remarkable discovery.
Subglacial Nuclear Reactor
Attached to Camp Century was the world’s very first mobile nuclear generator. The entire operation was so elaborate that it ended up being dubbed the “city under the ice.” But as you can imagine, the local government wasn’t very happy about the U.S. messing with nuclear energy on their turf.
In those days, global warming hadn’t yet been discovered, and U.S. officials who were in charge of the project that for sure that they would never be found out. The reactor, along with Camp Century, was just some pieces of a much larger (secret) military operation known as Project Iceworm.
Dozens of Seals
In Alaska, researchers stumbled upon an ancient burial site full of dozens of decaying seals. The bodies were found in the area of an old hunting cabin and were reportedly quickly decaying along with the melting ice.
One person on the team who found the seals said that their organs were “seeping out” of the corpses and that the area smelled like rotting fish for a good half-mile radius. But is that any surprise, considering they dated the bodies to be over 70 years old? The area was cleaned up and all of the remains were relocated (to somewhere less.... blatant.)
Anthrax
And speaking of scary things that have the ability to wipe out entire populations, an Anthrax outbreak in a remote area of Siberia caused villagers quite the scare. Although numerous people were infected, only one person was killed, but the virus also spread to more than 2,000 of the area’s reindeer.
Researchers determined that the cause of the outbreak was the melting permafrost, which had infected reindeer carcasses buried beneath it from decades ago. The melting ice not only caused the spores to return to the air but also got into the town’s groundwater by seeping into the soil. Not nice at all.