NASA scientists made a startling discovery during a 2024 mission to map Greenland's ice sheet: the long-forgotten remains of a Cold War-era US military base, hidden beneath layers of ice for decades.
Camp Century, an abandoned military base once used for a top-secret project, was revealed in high-resolution radar images taken by a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft during a routine survey in April.
The facility, which includes a network of tunnels carved into the ice, was part of Project Iceworm, a plan to build thousands of miles of tunnels in Greenland to house missiles capable of reaching the Soviet Union.
The NASA team was not looking for Camp Century specifically but was testing new radar equipment called UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) to study the ice sheet. While flying over the northern Greenland ice, the radar unexpectedly captured clear images of the base.
"We didn't know what it was at first," said Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before," Greene added.
Camp Century was constructed in 1959, originally intended as a research base for polar studies. However, its secret mission was far more ambitious. The US military planned to use the site for Project Iceworm, which aimed to construct 2,500 miles of tunnels to store nuclear missiles beneath the ice.
However, the project was eventually abandoned in 1967 due to the harsh conditions and difficulties in maintaining the ice tunnels, which were prone to collapse.
Melting Ice Raises Concerns Over Nuclear Waste at Camp Century
As global temperatures rise and the ice sheet continues to melt, there are growing concerns about the potential exposure of not just the base but also the nuclear waste left behind. Camp Century's abandoned nuclear reactor, which holds 47,000 gallons of nuclear waste, remains buried under the ice, and scientists worry that climate change could bring these materials closer to the surface.
"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," said Alex Gardner, another NASA scientist on the project, according to Space.com.
The discovery of Camp Century offers a rare glimpse into a long-forgotten chapter of the Cold War and highlights the lasting impact of climate change on the Arctic region.
As the ice continues to melt, the history and hidden secrets of places like Camp Century may surface, bringing new challenges to environmental and historical preservation.
