Secret 'city under the ice' nuclear base rediscovered by Nasa in Greenland
28 November 2024, 00:57
Nasa scientists have rediscovered a secret Cold War-era 'city under the ice' in Greenland.
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
Nasa scientist Chad Greene unexpectedly picked up the 'city' on his radar in April 2024.
It was spotted around 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland.
"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner who helped lead the project.
"We didn’t know what it was at first."
Camp Century, known as 'the city under the ice', was a military base originally built in Greenland 1959.
It was intended to be used as a secret launch site for ballistic missiles to reach the Soviet Union.
Read more: NASA to send spaceship on 1.8 billion mile mission to explore life on Jupiter
However, due to the instability of the ice sheet, the site was abandoned in 1967.
It gradually became buried in snow and ice, with it now sitting at least 100 ft below the ice sheet.
The camp has been picked up on radars before but looked like nothing more than a "blip" in deformed layers of ice.
"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 data was used to map out the structure of the hidden base, which appeared to match previous records of Camp Century.
Nasa's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) was used during the flight, which captures both a downward view and side-view of solid structures.
"Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet’s internal layers and the ice-bed interface," Greene said.
Gardner added: "Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, 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."
