While scanning the frozen surface of northwestern Greenland this year, NASA scientists stumbled across a “city under the ice” from the paranoid years of the Cold War.
The structure was Camp Century, an abandoned Arctic military research base run by the US between 1959 and 1967 during the Cold War. It was the hub of Project Iceworm, a plan to install a network of nuclear missile launch sites hidden amid the Arctic Ice Sheet that could survive a first strike from the Soviet Union.
Nuclear missiles never made it to the camp, fortunately, because they couldn’t get permission from the Danish government, which still holds sovereignty over Greenland. However, the complex was powered by a nuclear reactor, which left behind a large amount of radioactive debris, as well as loads of chemical and biological waste.
The site was abandoned in 1967 and left to be covered by Greenland’s perpetual snowfall. This year, however, faint echoes of the buried camp emerged when researchers flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet with a plane that had radar equipment attached to its belly.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” Alex Gardner, project leader and cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement.
“We didn’t know what it was at first,” Gardner added.
An image of the radar-beaming plane over Greenland, along with the imagery of Camp Century it captured.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech via NASA Earth Observatory
It’s estimated that the structures of the military facility are currently at least 30 meters (100 feet) below the snow-covered surface, shallow enough to be picked up by radar-beaming equipment.
Previous airborne surveys of Greenland have detected signals of Camp Century as they passed over the site. However, the latest imagery from April 2024 provides the best view yet.
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” explained Chad Greene, another cryospheric scientist at JPL.
Between 1959 and 1967, Camp Camp was a complex of tunnels and structures, all powered by a nuclear reactor.
With warming temperatures melting the planet’s ice sheets, there’s no guarantee the camp’s ruins will remain buried for long. A 2016 study indicated that the ice sheet on top of Camp Century could rapidly deteriorate within 75 years under a “business-as-usual scenario” of fossil fuel abuse.
If that happens, the report said, it would “guarantee the eventual remobilization of physical, chemical, biological, and radiological wastes abandoned at the site.” The researchers went on to suggest that the problem had the potential to spark fiddly political disputes between the Danish government and the US.
It’s uncertain if or when disaster might strike at Camp Century, but research initiatives like the recent project by NASA JPL could help keep tabs on the situation.
“Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to project rates of sea level rise,” noted Gardner.
