A Cold War 'city of ice' hints at US's ambitions in Greenland

The US is planning to establish two military bases on Greenland in the south and on the east coast, a far cry from the 17 in the Cold War era.

The Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig sites are part of a US deal expected to be signed with Denmark and Greenland on Tuesday, local time, according to Reuters.

It is the latest in Donald Trump's plans for the island, which the US president has eyed off since the beginning of his second term for "security" purposes.

Today, only the Pituffik Space Base still stands.

But the Nordic island also bears the remains of forgotten US military aspirations: ghost towns that include a "city of ice" and a station where its inhabitants looked to have disappeared overnight.

Camp Century, the 'city under the ice'

The Cold War brought fresh attention to the Arctic.

It bore the shortest route between the US and the Soviet Union, and Greenland lay right in its centre.

As part of a US-Denmark security plan, American forces built several bases in Greenland.

In 1959, one of them became Camp Century, a US base 200 kilometres from the coast.

US Army engineers built trenches in the snow and covered them with metal arches.

They used snow blowers to form frozen tunnels as long as 300 metres.

Encased completely within the ice sheet, Camp Century soon became better known as the "city under the ice".

Its official purpose was to conduct scientific research.

Little did Denmark know, it also doubled as a US nuclear missile testing site.

Dubbed Project Iceworm, US forces built a nuclear reactor under the ice in 1960 to run the 200-odd-person camp.

Its eventual goal was to create a 4,000km tunnel system on which up to 600 nuclear missiles could be deployed.

It was believed the crisscrossing rail tracks would stump the then-USSR as to the weapons' whereabouts, geologist Paul Bierman explains.

"[It was] in many ways a strategic fantasy," he told The Conversation in 2026.

The camp operated for six years until 1966, when it was abandoned.

The tunnels were collapsing inwards, and the project was deemed too expensive to maintain.

A few years later, those who returned found the ice had frosted the tunnels completely closed.

What lay inside remained forgotten for decades.

Then in 2016, researchers found the portion of ice covering Camp Century could start to melt by the end of the century, leaving us at risk of its remaining biological, chemical and radioactive waste.

Abandoned station with beer still on the counter

Like a Cold War Great Wall, the US also established a 5,800km chain of radar stations over the Arctic.

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line was built to give early warning of a nuclear strike from the USSR.

It stretched from Alaska to as far as Greenland.

Four DEW sites divided Greenland: one on the west coast, one towards Iceland and two on Greenland's Ice Cap.

Those built on the caps resembled offshore drilling rigs, balanced on steel columns above an icy mass.

Eventually, the stations died from obsolescence in 1988; modern technology had taken over.

It appears as if the four stations were abandoned in a rush.

Those who have since visited the sites describe uncanny sights.

Books still piled on a shelf. A deck of cards strewn across the floor.

Toke Brødsgaard from Greenland Today said he saw a beer still on the counter of the bar and a dart wedged in its board.

"The site remains so untouched that it is as if everyone left the place at the same time when it was abandoned in October 1988," he wrote of visiting DYE-2.

The town mined to extinction

It is no secret Mr Trump has long coveted Greenland's mineral-rich island.

And up until 1987, so too did other previous US administrations.

Greenland's Ivittuut was once home to the world's only commercial cryolite mine.

Cryolite plays a key role in aluminium production and therefore made the small town of huge importance to the US during WWII.

The mine reached its peak production in 1942 when 86,000 tons were shipped to the US and Canada for fighter plane manufacturing.

Former Ivittuut resident Peter Barfoed told Smithsonian Magazine that about 500 US soldiers guarded the town's mines from Nazis during this period.

Historian Rie Oldenburg also told the magazine the success of the US in WWII depended on the Greenland mine.

"Without it, the Allied forces would not be able to win the Battle of Britain and bomb Germany,"he said.

After the war, Denmark continued to mine the mineral until resources dried up, and the site closed around 1987.

In 1985, right before its closure, the mine still shipped up to 110,000 tons of the resource to the US.

But without its precious cryolite, the town soon became deserted.

Now, it sits as a tourist ghost town, a forgotten symbol of the US military's lingering presence in Greenland.