NASA rediscovers by chance a secret base built in 1959, during the Cold War

The NASA has published radar images of the abandoned US base ‘Camp Century’, a relic of the Cold War under the ice, taken by “chance” in an aerial survey in Greenland.

The images were taken last April by agency scientist Chad Greene, during a flight monitoring a radar instrument while probing the Greenland ice sheet.

Flying about 100 miles east of the US Space Force’s Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland, Greene snapped a photo from the aircraft window showing the vast, barren expanse of the ice sheet’s surface. . That’s when the radar unexpectedly detected something buried within the ice.

“We were looking for the ice bed and Camp Century appears,” Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project, said in a statement. “At first we didn’t know what it was.”

The city under the ice

Camp Century, also known as the “city under the ice,” is a relic of the Cold War. The US Army Corps of Engineers built the military base in 1959 by cutting a network of tunnels into the near-surface layer of the ice sheet. After it was abandoned in 1967, snow and ice continued to accumulate, and solid structures associated with the facility now lie at least 30 meters below the surface.

Radar measures distance by sending radio waves and timing the time it takes for them to reflect back to the sensor. Like an ultrasound for ice sheets, scientists can use radar to map the surface of the ice, its inner layers, and the bedrock beneath.

Previous aerial surveys flown over Camp Century have detected signs of the base within the ice. Those flights used conventional ground-penetrating radar, which points directly downward and produces a 2D profile of the ice sheet. In that view, the solid structures of Camp Century appear as a point in the warped ice sheets.

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However, the April 2024 flights had NASA’s UAVSAR (unmanned aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar) mounted in the belly of the aircraft. The system looks downward and sideways, producing maps with more dimensionality.

“In the new data, individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way they have never been seen before,” said Greene, also a cryospheric scientist at JPL. When comparing the new radar map of Camp Century with historical maps of the base’s planned layout, parallel structures appear to align with tunnels built to house a series of facilities.

Acquired by chance

Scientists have used maps acquired with conventional radar to corroborate estimates of the depth of Camp Century, part of an effort to estimate when melting and thinning of the ice sheet could re-expose the camp and any biological, chemical and remaining radioactive material that was buried with him. The scientific utility of the new Camp Century image obtained by UAVSAR remains to be seen; For now, it remains a novel curiosity acquired by chance.

Greene and Gardner did not intend to capture the image of Camp Century. “Our goal was to calibrate, validate and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR in mapping the inner layers of the ice sheet and the ice bed interface,” Greene said. Ultimately, these instruments are expected to help scientists measure the thickness of ice sheets in similar environments in Antarctica and constrain estimates of future sea level rise.