A NASA researcher made a surprising discovery beneath Greenland’s ice sheet. Chad Greene, in search of the ice bed, unexpectedly found a US Army base with a hidden history. The radar images unveiled Camp Century, a Cold War facility buried 100 feet under the ice, known as “the city under ice,” built between 1959 and 1960.
The base consists of 21 underground tunnels spanning about 9,800 feet, as per reports from the Express. Radar imagery captured from the Gulfstream III aircraft highlighted the distinct structures of the base, surprising the team led by Alex Gardner, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist.
The base was exposed using an Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), a radar commonly used to locate hidden structures globally, as reported by Popular Mechanics. Camp Century was established following the Defense of Greenland agreement between the United States and Denmark in 1951.
The camp’s purpose was to provide facilities for NATO forces to defend Greenland and the North Atlantic Treaty area. It was built using 6,000 tons of materials transported on slow-moving bobsleds after a 70-hour journey from Thule army base. Engineers carved out 1,000-foot passageways, named ‘Main Street,’ before constructing wooden buildings topped with steel roofs and installing a nuclear reactor.
Scientists at Camp Century conducted geological research, but speculation suggests that the base was a cover for Project Iceworm, a US nuclear weapon strategy involving ballistic missiles under the ice. Despite plans for expansion, Project Iceworm was never realized, leading to the camp’s closure in 1967, with the nuclear weapon program revealed in 1997.
Abandoned and left to the ice, Camp Century is said to hold 47,000 gallons of nuclear waste. Climate change impacts may reveal the camp by 2090, according to experts like William Colgan from York University.