In April 2024, NASA scientist Chad Greene flew aboard a Gulfstream III with a team of engineers, monitoring a radar instrument as it probed the Greenl

New View of the “City Under the Ice”

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2024-11-27 20:00:07

In April 2024, NASA scientist Chad Greene flew aboard a Gulfstream III with a team of engineers, monitoring a radar instrument as it probed the Greenland Ice Sheet below. Flying about 150 miles east from Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland, Greene snapped this photo from the aircraft’s window showing the vast, barren expanse of the ice sheet’s surface. That’s when the radar unexpectedly detected something buried within the ice.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”

Camp Century, also known as the “city under the ice,” is a relic of the Cold War. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the military base in 1959 by cutting a network of tunnels within the near-surface layer of the ice sheet. After it was abandoned in 1967, snow and ice continued to accumulate, and the solid structures associated with the facility now lie at least 30 meters (100 feet) below the surface.

Radar measures distance by sending out radio waves and timing how long it takes for them to reflect back to the sensor. Like an ultrasound for ice sheets, scientists can use radar to map the ice surface, its internal layers, and the bedrock below.

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