NASA scientistshave unearthed an astonishing man-made spectacle, lyingfrozen 100 feetbelow anicy surface.
The discovery was made when NASA scientist Chad Greene flew over northern Greenland with a team of engineers. They were armed with a radar instrument, probing theGreenland Ice Sheetbelow.
RELATED:
NASA scientists stumbled upon an astonishing man-made spectacle, lyingfrozen 100 feetbelow anicy surface
Image credits:NASA Earth Observatory
As they flew above theGreenlandIce Sheet on a NASA Gulfstream III plane in April, their radar picked up on something startling—hidden beneath 100 feet of ice was a network of structures that were unmistakably human-made.
The team eventually realized they had stumbled upon far more than what they bargained for: the remnants of Camp Century, a long-forgottenCold Warmilitary installation, frozen in secrecy and ice.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” Alex said.
Using UAVSAR radar, the team uncovered detailed structures while flying above the Greenland Ice Sheet in April
Signs of Camp Century were detected in the past during airborne surveys. At the time, the base’s solid structures appeared like a blip in the deformed layers of ice.
The researchers, who took the flights in April, had no idea they would discover the ambitious military project from the previous millennium during the mission.
The data produced maps with more dimensionality usingNASA’s UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar).
The structure was Camp Century, built in 1959 with a covert agenda to test deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” said Chad.
“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,” he added.
Camp Century was no ordinarymilitary base; it is a masterclass in deception.
Built at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the base’s official purpose was to test construction techniques in the harsh Arctic conditions and conduct scientific research.
The base, abandoned in 1967, was buried under decades of snow and ice accumulation
Image credits:Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
However, there was a top-secret military agenda also behind its construction. The base served as a secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War.
As per the initial plan, the base was meant to house 600 “Iceman missiles” that were capable of obliterating 80% of U.S. targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The underground city was planned to be three times the size ofDenmark, at 52,000 square miles, and include more than 2,000 firing positions for the Iceman missiles. But the plan was never realized.
The U.S. planned a sprawling underground missile launch network spanning 52,000 square miles but never realized it
Image credits:US Army/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
The infrastructure and waste was also left behind, leading to scientists later raising concerns about climate change causing the base to melt. Scientists pointed out how the waste could enter the atmosphere over time.
“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,”saidWilliam 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.
“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,” he said in a statement when the study was published.
Thanks! Check out the results:You May LikeDisney Worker Downloads Free AI Tool—Loses Job And $200,000 BonusesLei RV"It Will Cause Casualties": Scientist Addresses The City-Leveling Asteroid Threat For 2032Lei RVHarrison Ford Becomes A Viral Meme After Eating On Screen At 2025 SAG AwardsLei RV
Lei RV
News
