00:001968, a US bomber crashes onto the Greenland ice, carrying four nuclear bombs.
00:06Three are recovered.
00:07The fourth, and its radioactive core, vanishes into the ice.
00:11It has never been found.
00:13But that lost bomb is only the smallest of Greenland's secrets.
00:17Scientists aimed radar through three kilometers of ice, and what they saw stunned them.
00:21Hidden below is a canyon longer than the Grand Canyon, 1.8 million years sealed in ice.
00:26Deeper still, rare earth minerals worth more than Iraq's oil.
00:29A frozen island of 56,000 people that China and America are both desperate to control.
00:34And the ice holding it all together is collapsing at 200 billion tons a year.
00:38When it is gone, what happens to the world?
00:41To understand the terror of Greenland, you first need to understand its ice.
00:45It covers 80% of the island, roughly the size of Alaska.
00:491.5 kilometers thick on average.
00:52Over 3 kilometers at its deepest.
00:54If it all melted into the ocean, it would hold more water than the entire Gulf of Mexico.
00:59And that weight is so immense it has pushed the center of Greenland below sea level, crushing
01:03the island into a giant bowl.
01:05Ice in the bowl.
01:06Mountains on the rim.
01:08People only along the narrow coastal strip.
01:10That is why an island three times the size of France holds just 56,000 people, fewer than
01:15tiny Andorra.
01:16One third of them crowd into a single capital, Nuke.
01:19But America never saw it as empty.
01:22In 1959, at the height of the Cold War, the US military dug a secret city under the ice.
01:28Codename, Camp Century.
01:30From above, nothing but white.
01:31Below, 21 tunnels, nearly 3 kilometers long, housing 200 soldiers.
01:37A cafeteria, a hospital, a church, a barbershop, and a portable nuclear reactor, the first
01:42nuclear power plant ever built under ice.
01:45But Camp Century was a cover.
01:47Its real purpose was the forward base for a classified plan called Project Iceworm, a
01:51tunnel network across 52,000 square kilometers, three times the size of Denmark, armed with hundreds
01:56of nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union.
01:58The logic was simple, Soviet warheads could not punch through three kilometers of ice.
02:03American missiles could launch from beneath it.
02:05A doomsday arsenal buried in the ice.
02:08But the ice refused.
02:10Engineers discovered the ice sheet was not solid rock, it flowed, squeezed, and deformed.
02:15The tunnels were crushed in real time.
02:17By 1967, the US was forced to abandon it, leaving behind toxic waste and a forgotten reactor, still
02:23buried 30 meters down.
02:25And then came the discovery that truly shook science.
02:28In 1966, scientists at Camp Century drilled an ice core straight to the bedrock.
02:33At the bottom, they found plant fossils and sediment.
02:36Which meant one thing, Greenland had once been green, covered in vegetation.
02:40And this happened within the last million years.
02:43In geological terms, that is yesterday.
02:45A sheet that has covered Greenland for 18 million years had vanished entirely, not long ago.
02:51The ice sheet was far more fragile than anyone believed.
02:54Today, only one place still holds a small forest, 15 kilometers long, shielded by 1500-meter
03:00mountains.
03:01But that green patch may be where life returns.
03:04Because the ice is vanishing, fast.
03:06In 2006, NASA reported Greenland was melting 217 cubic kilometers a year, double the rate of
03:122001.
03:13By 2025, that figure had surged to 266 billion tons annually.
03:18And the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet.
03:22A 2025 study in the journal Cryosphere delivered a terrifying number.
03:26If global temperatures rise just 3.4 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the Greenland ice
03:31sheet crosses an irreversible threshold, and vanishes almost entirely within a few thousand
03:35years.
03:35What does that mean?
03:377 meters of sea level rise.
03:40Miami, gone.
03:41New Orleans, gone.
03:44Shanghai, gone.
03:45Most of the Netherlands, gone.
03:48Hundreds of millions of homes underwater.
03:50But the disaster does not stop there.
03:52Millions of cubic kilometers of fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic would disrupt the
03:56Gulf Stream, the current that keeps Europe warm.
03:59Greenland melts, tropical cities drown, and Europe freezes.
04:03That is the cruel paradox of the climate system.
04:05And yet, the other side of the coin, beneath the ice lie treasures that could reshape global
04:10power.
04:10The US Geological Survey estimates Greenland holds 13% of the world's undiscovered oil
04:15and 30% of its undiscovered gas, reserves rivaling Iraq.
04:19But oil is not the prize.
04:21Rare earths are.
04:2385% of the world's rare earths are controlled by one country.
04:27Every phone, every electric car, every fighter jet, every MRI machine depends on them.
04:32And Greenland could break that monopoly.
04:33One deposit alone, Kveinfeld, holds 11 million tons of rare earth oxides, the largest outside
04:40China.
04:40In 2019, Trump publicly offered to buy the entire island.
04:44Denmark called it absurd.
04:46Few laughed.
04:48By 2025, the White House openly discussed options, purchase, a free association agreement, even
04:54military means.
04:55The military option, a spokesperson said, is always on the table.
04:59But what do Greenlanders themselves want?
05:01Not.
05:01In a 2026 election, 5 of 6 parties backed eventual independence, from Denmark, not into America's
05:07arms.
05:0885% oppose being bought.
05:11Here is the trap, Greenland's government relies on 600 million dollars a year from Denmark.
05:15To go independent, it needs money.
05:18The money is buried under the ice.
05:20To get it, it must mine, and mining draws in the great powers, which makes independence
05:24only harder.
05:26Greenland is not the edge of the world.
05:27It is the crossroads of every force shaping this century.
05:31Climate change is melting its ice.
05:33Resource wars are tearing at its fate.
05:35Great powers are rewriting its future.
05:38And that ice, the ice holding it all together, is thinning every second.
05:46一直 august to the air to breathe.
05:51And that ice, the ice.
05:58Peebles are glassy.
05:59It is a very cheap eruption, and it's just fixed the air.
05:59You have to I-H-E-B-K-K-K-K-K.
06:11And that ice is not the loose end.
