NASA Scanners Detect Hidden Base Under Arctic Ice

"We didn’t know what it was at first."

Under the Ice

NASA scientists collected some marvelous readings while flying over the arctic ice in Greenland during an April 2024 survey.

The radar instrument onboard NASA's Gulfstream III aircraft spotted an abandoned "city under the ice": a relic of the Cold War that was once used as a military base by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The extremely remote outpost, dubbed Camp Century, includes a massive network of tunnels dug into the surface layers of the ice roughly 150 miles inland. Between 1959 and 1967, the site was used to test the feasibility of launching nuclear missiles from the Arctic.

Radar data obtained during the more recent flight shows a number of structures reaching into the icy surface underneath a 100-foot layer of ice and snow that accumulated over the last 56 years.

"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century," said NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner in a statement. "We didn’t know what it was at first."

Unexpected Discovery

NASA's UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar), mounted to the Gulfstream III's belly, collected the data.

"In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before," said NASA scientist Chad Greene, who was on board the aircraft during the survey, in a statement.

Scientists are using these maps to estimate when the camp could be exposed once again thanks to the ice sheet melting, a process that's being accelerated by climate change.

Experts have previously suggested that the site could start to be uncovered by the end of the century, which could have unintended consequences, including the exposure of radioactive waste materials and chemicals leaching into the surrounding environment.

The discovery of Camp Century was an entirely unexpected outcome for the team. The mission's primary goal was to study the effects of climate change on the Arctic.

"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," Greene said.

"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," he added.

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