A surprising NASA discovery: an abandoned city hidden deep under the ice

In April 2024, NASA scientists surveying the Greenland Ice Sheet made a surprising discovery: an abandoned city hidden deep beneath the ice, identified as Camp Century, a Cold War-era US military base built in 1959. Chad Greene, a NASA cryospheric scientist, accidentally discovered the structures during a routine survey mission. “Based on the new data, individual structures in the mystery city are visible in a way that has never been seen before,” Greene said.

The discovery occurred while a NASA team was testing an uninhabited aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar (UAVSAR) system aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft. Alex Gardner, a cryosphere scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), noted: “We were looking for the bottom of the ice and discovered Camp Century,” he said. The UAVSAR system enhances radar imaging capabilities, enabling comprehensive mapping that provided significantly more detail than previous ground-penetrating radar surveys. The photos revealed individual Camp Century structures that had never been seen before.

Camp Century was built in 1959 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of Project Iceworm, a secret initiative to deploy up to 600 medium-range ballistic missiles in a network of tunnels more than 4,000 kilometers long. According to Gizmodo, the base served as a bunker after a nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War, ostensibly being built as a research facility. The complex consisted of 21 interconnected tunnels over 3,000 meters long, including living quarters, a hospital, a laboratory, a chapel, a library and recreation areas, intended for personnel and nuclear weapons near Russia’s borders.

At its peak, Camp Century could accommodate 200 people and was powered by the PM-2A portable nuclear reactor, which provided electricity and heat to sustain operations in the frigid Arctic conditions. Newsweek notes that the nuclear reactor was a bold step towards Arctic exploration. However, due to the unstable nature of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the project became impractical, and Camp Century was ultimately closed in 1967 after the failure of Project Iceworm.

After leaving the base, hazardous waste remained, including radioactive and biological materials. It included 47,000 gallons of nuclear waste from the reactor and 6.3 million gallons of sewage. The melting Greenland ice sheet threatens to unearth these dangerous relics, risking their release into the environment and threatening Greenland’s delicate ecosystem.

Radar images obtained by the NASA team show the presence of buried waste at Camp Century, and the images match historical maps showing the camp’s tunnels and facilities. After pinpointing the location of the radar anomaly, researchers realized they had inadvertently 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 greater dimensionality than typical ground-penetrating radar, providing an unprecedented view of the condition of Camp Century after nearly 60 years under the ice.

The discovery highlights the importance of scientific missions in understanding military history and its impact on the environment. SciencePost reports that debates are emerging about the management of facilities like Camp Century, amid concerns about whether to excavate the waste to avoid an environmental disaster or wait until ice re-covers the remains. “By examining the deep layers of ice, we discovered much more than just an abandoned base. “This place is a tangible reminder of ambitious projects and the risks they pose even today,” Gardner said.

NASA plans to use data collected from the campaign for future studies of Earth’s large ice sheets. According to Space.com, the flight, which captured new photos of Camp Century, “will enable the next generation of mapping campaigns in Greenland, Antarctica and beyond.” Scientists say any potentially harmful biological, chemical and radioactive remains that were buried when the facility was dismantled could surface due to meltdown.

This article was written in cooperation with Alchemiq, a company dealing with generative artificial intelligence