NASA scientists have unearthed an astonishing man-made spectacle, lying frozen 100 feet below an icy surface.
“We didn’t know what it was at first,” admitted Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), according to a statement released by NASA's Earth Observatory this week.
The discovery was made when NASA scientist Chad Greene flew over northern Greenland with a team of engineers. They were armed with a radar instrument, probing the Greenland Ice Sheet below.
Highlights
- NASA discovered Camp Century, a hidden Cold War base under Greenland's ice.
- “We didn’t know what it was at first,” admitted Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
- The base was built in 1959 and abandoned in 1967, buried by snow and ice.
- Camp Century was a secret US project to test deploying nuclear missiles.
NASA scientists stumbled upon an astonishing man-made spectacle, lying frozen 100 feet below an icy surface
Image credits: NASA Earth Observatory
As they flew above the Greenland Ice Sheet on a NASA Gulfstream III plane in April, their radar picked up on something startling—hidden beneath 100 feet of ice was a network of structures that were unmistakably human-made.
The team eventually realized they had stumbled upon far more than what they bargained for: the remnants of Camp Century, a long-forgotten Cold War military installation, frozen in secrecy and ice.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” Alex said.
The abandoned Cold War-era military base was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1959 and was nicknamed the “city under the ice.”
Using UAVSAR radar, the team uncovered detailed structures while flying above the Greenland Ice Sheet in April
Image credits: NASA Earth Observatory
The base was built by cutting a network of tunnels within the near-surface layer of the ice sheet and was abandoned in 1967. Since then, snow and ice accumulated over the military relic, which is now buried 100 feet below the surface.
Signs of Camp Century were detected in the past during airborne surveys. At the time, the base’s solid structures appeared like a blip in the deformed layers of ice.
The researchers, who took the flights in April, had no idea they would discover the ambitious military project from the previous millennium during the mission.
The data produced maps with more dimensionality using NASA’s UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar).
The structure was Camp Century, built in 1959 with a covert agenda to test deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War
Image credits: NASA Earth Observatory
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” said Chad.
“Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet’s internal layers and the ice-bed interface,” he added.
Camp Century was no ordinary military base; it is a masterclass in deception.
Built at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the base’s official purpose was to test construction techniques in the harsh Arctic conditions and conduct scientific research.
The base, abandoned in 1967, was buried under decades of snow and ice accumulation
Image credits: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
However, there was a top-secret military agenda also behind its construction. The base served as a secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War.
As per the initial plan, the base was meant to house 600 “Iceman missiles” that were capable of obliterating 80% of U.S. targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The underground city was planned to be three times the size of Denmark, at 52,000 square miles, and include more than 2,000 firing positions for the Iceman missiles. But the plan was never realized.
The U.S. planned a sprawling underground missile launch network spanning 52,000 square miles but never realized it
Image credits: US Army/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
The missile launch program was rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leading to the base being abandoned in 1967.
The infrastructure and waste was also left behind, leading to scientists later raising concerns about climate change causing the base to melt. Scientists pointed out how the waste could enter the atmosphere over time.
“When we looked at the climate simulations, they suggested that rather than perpetual snowfall, it seems that as early as 2090, the site could transition from net snowfall to net melt,” said William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a research associate at CIRES who co-authored a study on the base released in August.
“Once the site transitions from net snowfall to net melt, it’s only a matter of time before the wastes melt out; it becomes irreversible,” he said in a statement when the study was published.