NASA Scanners Detect Hidden Base Beneath Arctic Ice

“We didn’t know what it was at first.”

Under the Ice

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

Radar device on NASA’s Gulfstream III aircraft saw an abandoned “city” under the ice“: A Cold War relic once used as a military base by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The extremely remote outpost, called Century Camp, contains a massive network of tunnels dug into the surface layers of ice approximately 150 miles inland. Between 1959 and 1967, this area was used to test the feasibility of launching nuclear missiles from the North Pole.

Radar data obtained during the last flight shows numerous structures reaching the icy surface beneath a 30-meter layer of ice and snow accumulated over the last 56 years.

“We were looking for the ice bed, and Camp Century comes up,” said Alex Gardner, cryosphere scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. expression. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”

Unexpected Discovery

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

“In the new data, individual structures in the hidden city can be seen in a way never seen before,” NASA scientist Chad Greene, who was on the plane during the research, said in a statement.

Scientists use these maps to predict when the camp might once again be exposed thanks to the melting of the ice sheet, a process accelerated by climate change.

Experts had previously suggested that the site could be exposed towards the end of the centurySituations that may lead to undesirable consequences, including the release of radioactive waste materials and the leakage of chemicals into the environment.

The discovery of Camp Century was a completely unexpected result for the team. The primary goal of the mission 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 inner layers of the ice sheet and the ice bed interface,” Greene said.

“Without detailed information about ice thickness, it is impossible to know how ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to predict rates of sea level rise,” he added.

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