NASA scientists in Greenland took an unprecedented look at Cold War history when surveys found an abandoned “city under the ice.”
In April, two scientists surveying the Greenland Ice Sheet found Camp Century, a Cold War U.S. military base while attempting to map the ice sheet.
“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 said in a statement. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
It’s not the first time the base has been seen on radar flights, according to NASA, though those flights used conventional radar whereas the April flights used an advanced version of the technology called Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar.
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist at JPL who was also on the flight, said in a statement.
What was Camp Century?
Camp Century was built by the U.S. within the ice sheet in 1959, according to the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder (CIRES).
The base’s official purpose was to test construction techniques and conduct scientific research in the Arctic. It also served as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War.
The base housed 85-200 soldiers and was powered by a nuclear reactor. The ice core samples taken from the base are still cited in research, according to William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a research associate at CIRES who co-authored a study on the base released in August.
The base was abandoned in 1967 after the missile launch program was rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removed the nuclear reaction chamber from the site but left behind all other infrastructure and waste.
Climate change could allow nuclear waste to be released
Scientists have raised concerns that climate change will cause the approximately 100 feet of ice covering the base to melt and allow waste from the base to enter the atmosphere.
“When we looked at the climate simulations, they suggested that rather than perpetual snowfall, it seems that as early as 2090, the site could transition from net snowfall to net melt,” Colgan said in a statement at the time of the study’s publishing. “Once the site transitions from net snowfall to net melt, it’s only a matter of time before the wastes melt out; it becomes irreversible.”
Scientists at CIRES estimate that there are 136 acres of waste from Camp Century buried under the ice, including 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel, 63,000 gallons of wastewater and an unknown volume of low-level radioactive coolant from the nuclear generator.
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