What a US military base lost under Greenland’s ice sheet reveals about the island’s real strategic importance

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers via Wikimedia Commons

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.

It was located about 150 miles inland from Thule, now Pituffik, a large American military base set up in north-western Greenland after a military agreement with Denmark during world war two.

Camp Century operated for six years...