When NASA scientist Chad Green and a team of engineers flew over northern Greenland in April, they didn’t expect their radar to discover artifacts buried deep in the ice. Green and his team were flying over the Greenland Ice Sheet on a NASA Gulfstream III plane to examine the barren expanse of ice, which is more than a mile deep in some areas, when a radar instrument detected an anomaly. I sensed something.
“At first we didn’t know what it was,” Green said in a statement released this week by NASA’s Earth Observatory along with new images of the discovery. “We were looking for ice and pop-up Camp Century beds.”
It turns out the team stumbled upon an abandoned Cold War-era military base built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1959. Dubbed the “city under the ice,” the site consists of a network of tunnels carved into the ice sheet. Abandoned in 1967, snow and ice accumulated over time and buried it approximately 100 feet below the surface.
This base was built during the Cold War era, when tensions were high between the United States and the Soviet Union, as part of Project Iceworm, a top secret project at the time to experiment with building a missile launch site beneath the ice sheet of Greenland. Constructed. Camp Century, a remote nuclear facility, was built to study the feasibility of such a project, but it was never realized and the base remained permanently buried under ice. It was abolished.
Pictorial Parade/Archive Photo/Getty
The “city under the ice” had been captured in previous radar scans, but instruments used on a NASA flight in April provided an unexpected but more detailed look.
“The new data allows us to see the individual structures of the secret city in a way we’ve never seen before,” said Green, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Past scans have used a type of radar that points directly down at the ground to produce a two-dimensional scan of structures buried beneath the ice. The agency said Green’s flight used NASA’s unmanned aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar, which can create “more three-dimensional” maps.
Photos released by NASA on Monday show features of the base hidden deep beneath the ice, appearing as an anomaly near the base of the ice sheet.
NASA Earth Observatory/Mikala Garrison, Jesse Allen, Chad Green
“Scientists used maps obtained with conventional radar to support their estimates of the depth of Camp Century. “It is part of an effort to estimate when biological, chemical, and radioactive waste in the United States may be re-exposed,” NASA’s Earth Observatory said in an article this week. “The scientific utility of the new UAVSAR images of Camp Century remains to be seen. For now, it remains a novel curiosity acquired by chance.”
A 2016 study of the abandoned base suggested that the facility could no longer be considered “forever preserved” as climate change accelerates the rate at which Arctic ice is melting.
CBS News” Walter Cronkite visits Camp Century Since the program aired in 1961, I was there to see a facility that was still under construction. Capt. Tom Evans, the camp’s commanding officer, explained to him that the purpose of the program was threefold. “Firstly, we have a number of promising new concepts for polar construction; secondly, we provide actual field testing of this new nuclear power plant; and finally, we are here in Greenland, inland. We are building Camp Century to provide an excellent base for our scientists to continue research and development activities where they can.”
CBS
The exact nature of that research and development work is not discussed in Cronkite’s report for the CBS documentary “The Twentieth Century.” (A condensed version of that report is available at the link above.)
In 2016, when he revisited Cronkite’s decades-old trip to Camp Century on his 60 Minutes show, producer Daniel Lutenik said the trip was fascinating and frozen in the vast expanses of the Greenland Ice Sheet. He said he was amazed at the evolution of humanity’s interest in spreading.
“At the time (of Camp Century), the Cold War was considered the greatest threat to humanity,” Luetenik said. “And now this region has become a destination for climate scientists trying to study environmental change. So now it has a second purpose.”
