Frozen Frontiers Building Homes at the Edge of the Habitable World

The Army described it as a research station. Officially, it was a place where scientists could live beneath the Greenland ice sheet and study the frozen world above them. Unofficially, it was the first step toward something far stranger and far more ambitious: a hidden network of tunnels under the ice, built to hold nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union.

The base was called Camp Century. It operated from 1959 until 1967 and consisted of twenty-one tunnels with a combined length of about 9,800 feet, roughly three kilometers. Engineers built it with a trench-and-arch method. They cut long trenches into the snow, roofed them with arched structures, and buried the whole thing under fresh snow. The result was a small underground town where soldiers and scientists lived, ate, and worked. It was powered by a nuclear reactor, a portable unit the military boasted about at the time. Decades later, historians would look back on the experiment with portable nuclear power at remote bases and judge it, in the words of one retrospective, as a venture that "didn't go well."

This episode is about a question that Camp Century asked in its most extreme form, and that every polar settlement since has had to answer in its own way. How do you make a home where the ground itself will not hold still, and where the cold is trying to remove you? We will follow that question from the Greenland ice to the permafrost towns of the Arctic, to the Antarctic coast, to a former coal town in Svalbard, and finally off the planet entirely.