Research & Development in the Arctic ~ 1955 US Army; The Big Picture TV-366 (Patreon)

more at http://quickfound.net/

""THE BIG PICTURE" cameramen follow Army engineers into Artic wastelands -- The mission of the First Engineer Arctic Task Force of the Army's Corps of Engineers is dramatically filmed by cameramen of THE BIG PICTURE in this film presentation. Across dangerous wastes of ice and snow the camera lens follows these engineer soldiers as they construct roads stretching deeper and deeper into the Arctic. As Army civilian scientists and soldiers of the First Engineer Arctic Task Force penetrate deeper into the Arctic vastness, new problems and new dangers present themselves. In some places, the snow and ice covering the land prevent the engineers from reaching the dirt, or fill, needed for road building. Men and vehicles must travel over the snow. But as the shape of the land far below alters, hidden changes take place in the unseen snow layers underfoot. Dangerous, man-killing crevasses -- great vaults and hundred-foot caverns -- are formed. All this and more is captured on film for THE BIG PICTURE. It is a challenge, a frontier which must be conquered. American ingenuity, determination, and scientific skill are dedicated to this task."

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Project Iceworm was the code name for a top secret United States Army program of the Cold War, which aimed to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. The ultimate objective of placing medium-range missiles under the ice — close enough to strike targets within the Soviet Union — was kept secret from the Government of Denmark. To study the feasibility of working under the ice, a highly publicized "cover" project, known as Camp Century, was launched in 1960. Unstable ice conditions within the ice sheet caused the project to be canceled in 1966...

To test the feasibility of construction techniques a project site called "Camp Century" was started by the United States military, located at an elevation of 6,600 feet (2,000 m) in northwestern Greenland, 150 miles (240 km) from the American Thule Air Base.[3][4] The radar and air base at Thule had already been in active use since 1951.

Camp Century was described at the time as a demonstration of affordable ice-cap military outposts. The secret Project Iceworm was to be a system of tunnels 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) in length, used to deploy up to 600 nuclear missiles, that would be able to reach the Soviet Union in case of nuclear war. The missile locations would be under the cover of Greenland's ice sheet and were supposed to be periodically changed. While Project Iceworm was secret, plans for Camp Century were discussed with and approved by the Kingdom of Denmark, and the facility, including its nuclear power plant, was profiled in The Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1960.

The "official purpose" of Camp Century, as explained by the United States Department of Defense to Danish government officials in 1960, was to test various construction techniques under Arctic conditions, explore practical problems with a semi-mobile nuclear reactor, as well as supporting scientific experiments on the icecap. A total of 21 trenches were cut and covered with arched roofs within which prefabricated buildings were erected.[6] With a total length of 3,000 metres (1.9 mi), these tunnels also contained a hospital, a shop, a theater and a church. The total number of inhabitants was around 200. From 1960 until 1963 the electricity supply was provided by means of the world's first mobile/portable nuclear reactor, designated PM-2A and designed by Alco for the U.S. Army. Water was supplied by melting glaciers and tested to determine whether germs such as the plague were present.

Within three years after it was excavated, ice core samples taken by geologists working at Camp Century demonstrated that the glacier was moving much faster than anticipated and would destroy the tunnels and planned launch stations in about two years. The facility was evacuated in 1965, and the nuclear generator removed. Project Iceworm was canceled, and Camp Century closed in 1966...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Air_Base