NASA's startling discovery: an abandoned city buried deep beneath the ice

In April 2024, NASA scientists conducting an ice sheet survey over Greenland made a startling discovery: an abandoned city buried deep beneath the ice, identified as Camp Century, a Cold War-era U.S. military base built in 1959. Chad Greene, a NASA cryospheric scientist, accidentally uncovered the structures during a routine research mission. "In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before," Greene said.

The discovery occurred while the NASA team was testing the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) system aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft. Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), remarked, "We were looking for the bed of the ice, and out pops Camp Century," he said. The UAVSAR system enhances radar imaging capabilities, allowing for comprehensive mapping that provided far more detail than earlier ground-penetrating radar surveys. The images revealed individual structures of Camp Century that had never been seen before.

Camp Century was constructed in 1959 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of Project Iceworm, a secret initiative aimed at deploying up to 600 intermediate-range ballistic missiles in a network of tunnels over 4,000 kilometers long. According to Gizmodo, the base served as a nuclear apocalypse bunker during the Cold War while ostensibly being built as a scientific outpost. The complex featured 21 interconnected tunnels spanning over 9,800 feet, including accommodations, a hospital, laboratory, chapel, library, and recreational areas, designed to house personnel and nuclear weaponry near Russian borders.

At its peak, Camp Century had a capacity for 200 people and was powered by the PM-2A portable nuclear reactor, which supplied electricity and heat to sustain operations in the freezing Arctic conditions. Newsweek notes that the nuclear reactor was a bold leap into Arctic exploration. However, due to the unstable nature of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the project became impractical, and Camp Century was finally closed in 1967 after Project Iceworm failed.

When the base was abandoned, hazardous waste, including radioactive and biological materials, was left behind. It included 47,000 gallons of nuclear waste from its reactor and 6.3 million gallons of wastewater. The thawing Greenland Ice Sheet threatens to unbury these dangerous relics, risking their release into the environment and threatening Greenland's fragile ecosystem.

The radar images obtained by the NASA team show the presence of buried waste material at Camp Century, and the images match historical maps representing the camp's tunnels and facilities. After pinpointing the radar anomaly's location, researchers realized they had accidentally mapped Camp Century and its current conditions, allowing them to create a new map of the facility's remains. The UAVSAR system produced maps with more dimensionality than typical ground-penetrating radar, providing unprecedented views into the state of Camp Century after nearly 60 years under the ice.

The discovery highlights the importance of scientific missions in understanding military history and its environmental impacts. SciencePost reports that debates are emerging about the management of sites like Camp Century, with concerns about whether to extract the waste to avoid an environmental disaster or wait for the ice to cover these remnants again. "By studying the deep layers of ice, we discovered much more than an abandoned base. This site is a tangible reminder of ambitious projects and the risks they pose even today," Gardner stated.

NASA plans to use the data collected by the campaign to inform future studies of Earth's large ice sheets. According to Space.com, the flight that captured the new images of Camp Century would "enable the next generation of mapping campaigns in Greenland, Antarctica and beyond." The researchers assert that any potentially harmful biological, chemical, and radioactive residue that was buried when the facility was dismantled could resurface due to melting.

This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq