NASA scientists have discovered a hidden remnant of the Cold War – a “secret city” buried under the Greenland Ice Sheet, as reported by Space.com. During a scientific survey in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft equipped with radar to map the depth of the ice revealed the long-forgotten remains of Camp Century, a US military base built in the 1960s.
The base, which was buried under layers of ice for decades, was part of a top-secret Cold War project called Project Iceworm. The objective was to build a 2,500 mile (4,023 km) tunnel in northern Greenland, where nuclear intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) could be hidden and launched into the Soviet Union. “We were looking for ice beds and out pops Camp Century. We didn’t know what it was at first,” said Chad Green, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “In the new data, the individual structures of the secret city appear in a way that has never been seen before,” he added.
Camp Century, built in 1959, consisted of a tunnel carved into the ice sheet, but was abandoned in 1967 due to high costs and the risk of the tunnel collapsing. The legacy of Project Iceworm now lives on in images captured by NASA. The tunnel was initially designed to house missiles capable of withstanding the pressure of launch through ice.
However, the melting ice sheets now pose a new threat – dangerous residues from the base, including weapons, fuel and other contaminants, could soon be exposed to the world. In response, the US government released a statement in 2017 acknowledging the dangers of climate change and pledging to work with the Danish and Greenland authorities to address the issue.
Scientists have also warned that melting Greenland’s ice sheet could have other effects. “Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmospheres, which greatly limits our ability to project the rate of sea level rise,” said Alex Gardner, another JPL scientist.
For now, Camp Century is a reminder of the Cold War and an opportunity for scientists to study the effects of climate change on Earth’s ice sheets. NASA plans to use data from these surveys to inform future research on the impact of warming temperatures.
