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An abandoned Cold War military base buried underneath the ice sheet in northern Greenland has been rediscovered accidentally by NASA researchers.
Camp Century, known as the ‘city under the ice’, was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1959 as part of Project Iceworm.
It was intended to serve as a prototype underground complex capable of deploying ballistic missiles to the Soviet Union – but was abandoned in 1967 due to the instability of the surrounding ice.
The discovery was made when a NASA-operated Gulfstream III research aircraft was measuring the surrounding area, some 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base, in spring last year.
‘We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,’ said Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist with NASA and the leader of the research team. ‘We didn’t know what it was at first,’ he added.
The camp’s location had been found previously, but NASA’s latest radar equipment revealed more about its dimensions. As Greene explained: ‘In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been before.’
The camp, which was initially built just below the surface, has now been submerged by more than 30 metres of snow and ice.
In its day, the ‘city’ consisted of 21 tunnels running to a total of two miles. No nuclear weaponry was ever housed there, nor was permission sought from the Danish government to do so.
