dip.quick

The U.S. Army built a nuclear-powered city inside a glacier. Then it left 24 million liters of sewage in it.

Freeze on the TV at 0:13: that's the Army's real opening card, thanking Denmark. Then count what the card leaves out.

Everything in this is real. The film clips and their narrator are the Army's own 1961 TV episode about Camp Century. The rest is the record: Project Iceworm was a secret plan (never built) for up to 600 missiles under the Greenland ice, Denmark's consent for it was never obtained, the camp was abandoned by 1967, and its waste is still buried there (a 2021 assessment found no melt risk before 2100).

Meet DIP, our new house stick figure. More toons coming.

Film: "City Under the Ice", THE BIG PICTURE (1961), US Army Pictorial Center for the Department of the Army, about Camp Century (National Archives 111-TV-514). Public domain via archive.org — archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.2569752
Sources: Wikipedia, "Camp Century" and "Project Iceworm". Narration: text-to-speech.

What you're looking at

Camp Century was a US Army base cut into the Greenland ice sheet from 1959: about 200 men lived in its tunnels, which held a hospital, a shop, a theater and a church, and from 1960 to 1963 it ran on the PM-2A, described as the world's first mobile/portable nuclear reactor. The Army made an episode of its TV series THE BIG PICTURE about it in 1961, "City Under the Ice"; the film opens with a card thanking Denmark for its cooperation and its narrator promises to "build a city under the ice" (02:29) and boasts "the largest deep freeze in the world" (25:58).

The film leaves out Project Iceworm: a secret Army plan, never built, to hide up to 600 nuclear missiles in some 2,500 miles of tunnels under the ice, their launch sites "periodically changed". The necessary consent from the Danish government was never obtained; the plan came to light in 1995. The ice moved faster than expected, deforming the tunnels, and the camp was abandoned by 1967. Its waste was left behind: by a 2016 study's estimate about 200,000 liters of diesel, PCBs, radioactive waste and 24 million liters of untreated sewage. A 2021 assessment found no risk of it surfacing through melt before 2100.

This is the first "toon": the story told by DIP, the house stick figure, and a plain ink cast, with the Army's own film dragged in as evidence.

FileFILE_042.MOV
KindReel, 9:16
On Instagram25 OCT 2026
RightsPublic domain
SourceOpen the archive.org file
Referencesthe film (timestamps in brackets)Camp Century, WikipediaProject Iceworm, Wikipedia
InstagramWatch it on Instagram

#reel