NASA has published images of a long-forgotten nuclear base that was constructed up to 30 metres below a solid ice sheet at the height of fears about nuclear armageddon. One of the aeronautical organisation’s scientists discovered the huge subterranean ice bunker during a routine research mission.
While flying a cutting-edge autonomous plane over the Greenland ice sheet, Chad Greene from NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory spotted something unexpected under the miles of ice. Using the plane’s radar and 3D modelling, he was able to reconstruct the strange structure that loomed under a huge glacier.
Dubbed the ‘city under the ice’, he had unwittingly stumbled across a Cold War nuclear base constructed by the United States. Called Camp Century, it had been built with the original purpose of storing nuclear missiles that could be fired should the US be wiped out by the Soviet Union.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” another member of the team said after the discovery.
Officially, the remote underground base was a research facility that was abandoned quietly after eight years in operation. The bunker’s role as a front for the doomsday ‘Project Iceworm’ was not discovered until decades later when, in 1997, it was admitted that Camp Century had been a key part of the US’ nuclear defence project.
Spanning 9800 feet over 21 tunnels, the vast underground megastructure was itself powered by a nuclear reactor throughout its occupation by the US military, from 1959 to 1967. During this time, a series of unforeseen problems emerged with their nuclear-powered base, 30 metres under Greenland’s vast ice sheet.
Not only did human waste pits vent directly into the tunnel system after spreading horizontally under the ice, rendering much of Camp Century with a fetid smell that was only moderately improved through greater ventilation, but military planners soon spotted an issue with their nuclear missile scheme.
Shifts in the ice sheet would make the safe storage of these missiles, as well as the construction of launch sites, unfeasible. Something made clear after the base was abandoned, when much of the camp was crushed under the vast weight of the glacier.
In the decades since the nuclear reactor was removed and the base’s true purpose revealed, the sunken base has remained largely hidden, though debates about potentially hazardous waste from the base have continued among environmentalists.
For years the infrastructure of Camp Century was little more than a blip on the radar, but NASA was able to capture a glimpse of it using their ‘Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar’, which was able to map the ice’s surface and internal layers to create a 3D structure.
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” said Greene. The cryospheric scientist pointed out that this discovery was accidental and the team’s original goal was to test out the unmanned radar drone’s ability.
Information collected by the team can now be used in the effort to estimate whether climate change and the melting ice sheets could reveal Camp Century once more – along with its nuclear, chemical, and other radioactive waste.
“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,” the scientists added.
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