NASA has released photos of a US military base that was built in the ice in Greenland during the Cold War and later abandoned. The photos were captured by happenstance while NASA scientist Chad Greene was flying over the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Greene was flying over the ice sheet in April with a team of engineers. While checking their radar on a NASA Gulfstream III plane, the team found a manmade structure buried deep within the ice.
“We didn’t know what it was at first,” Greene said in a statement from NASA.
The press release came from NASA’s Earth Observatory and shared images of the discovery.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” Greene said.
The military base was built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1959 and nicknamed the “city under the ice.” The base includes a network of tunnels carved into the ice sheet. By 1967, it was abandoned by the US government and slowly became buried almost 100 feet below the surface with ice and snow building up over the top of it.
The base was built as part of Project Iceworm, a secret plan to experiment with building a missile launch site under the Greenland Ice Sheet during the Cold War.
Camp Century, a nuclear-powered installation, was built to study the feasibility of the project. However, it was never realized and the base decommissioned due to the understanding that it would be buried forever under the ice.
While the base was never new to NASA’s scans, the flight from April provided a more detailed survey.
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” Greene said.
NASA shared a photo last week that showed the features of the base, which are hidden deep under the ice sheet.
“Scientists have used maps acquired with conventional radar to corroborate estimates of Camp Century’s depth — part of an effort to estimate when melting and thinning of the ice sheet could re-expose the camp and any remaining biological, chemical, and radioactive waste that was buried along with it,” NASA’s Earth Observatory shared. “The scientific utility of the new UAVSAR image of Camp Century remains to be seen; for now, it remains a novel curiosity acquired by chance.”