A team flying over Greenland this past April spotted something unnatural in the vast ice sheet below: an abandoned city under the ice. It sounds far-f

NASA Radar Reveals Cold War ‘City Under the Ice’

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2024-11-26 14:30:04

A team flying over Greenland this past April spotted something unnatural in the vast ice sheet below: an abandoned city under the ice.

It sounds far-fetched, but the city is real and younger than you might think. It is Camp Century, a military base built out beneath Greenland by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1959. The team’s April 2024 flyby revealed Camp Century as an aberrational radar signal in an otherwise desolate swath of Greenland.

“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 and a member of the team, in an Earth Observatory release. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”

Camp Century was built in a frigid part of the world, where temperatures dip to -70° Fahrenheit (-57° Celsius) and wind speeds can exceed 120 miles per hour (193 kilometers per hour). Nevertheless, the engineering corps built a sprawling base that could host 200 soldiers at a time.

When Camp Century was built it was nearer to the surface, but the site was abandoned in 1967. In the intervening 57 years, at least 100 feet (30 meters) of snow and ice have accumulated on top of the site. The 47,000 gallons of radioactive waste produced by Camp Century’s nuclear reactor was buried along with it, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.