NASA radar uncovers ‘chilling’ lost city buried beneath Greenland’s ice – what lies below?
Credit: Shutterstock, MuSal
NASA discovery: Horrifying ‘City under the Ice’ rediscovered in Greenland.
Frozen in time: The secret city buried beneath Greenland’s ice is back in the spotlight thanks to a chilling radar discovery by NASA.
In a new discovery straight out of a military horror film, a cutting-edge radar system aboard a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft has unearthed a long-forgotten Cold War relic: Camp Century, also known as the ‘City under the Ice.’ Built in 1959 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the base was abandoned in 1967 and has since been swallowed whole by the encroaching ice sheet. The ‘city’ has been entombed beneath layers of ice for decades, dark, dead, uncommunicated, and full of horrors. What they discovered next is shocking.
Radar reveals hidden structures under the ice.
It was meant to be just another test flight for NASA, but it turned into a spine-tingling discovery when in April 2024, scientist Chad Greene and his team took to the skies above northern Greenland, armed with a cutting-edge radar system known as UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar). Their mission at first was to map the icy layers of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
But as they soared 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base, a radar ping made everyone sit up on the edge of their seats. Nothing was supposed to be there.
Beneath 30 metres of deep hard ice lay something extraordinary. “We were looking for the ice bed and out pops Camp Century,” explained Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “At first, we didn’t even know what we were looking at,” but then…
A lost city full of secrets
Camp Century was no ordinary military base. The ‘City under the Ice,’ featured a network of tunnels housing a nuclear reactor, living quarters, and laboratories.
Back in the 1960s, it was a top-secret Cold War outpost, designed to test the feasibility of deploying missiles from beneath the Arctic ice.
Since its abandonment, the ice sheet has slowly buried the camp deep, cutting it off from the outside world, and hiding its secrets deep beneath Greenland’s frigid surface. But thanks to the new radar tech, the ‘ghostly’ layout of its structures has come to light once more. “The individual structures of the city are visible like never before,” Greene revealed. The radar imagery even lines up perfectly with historical blueprints of the base.
The horrors lurking below
This isn’t just a quirky blast from the past. Camp Century comes with a ticking time bomb. Buried along with the base are biological, chemical, and even radioactive waste – left to freeze in place when the camp was shut down. Melting and thinning of Greenland’s ice sheet could re-expose these horrors to the surface.
Scientists have been trying to estimate when that could happen, and the new radar data could hold crucial clues. Gardner warned that without understanding the thickness of ice sheets, NASA cannot predict how they’ll respond to global warming. The melting ice has serious implications for sea level rise, as well as the dangerous chemicals entombed with Camp Century.
A lucky discovery, a chilling future
The April 2024 radar findings were a fluke by all accounts- the team wasn’t even looking for the camp. According to Greene, NASA aimed to test UAVSAR’s capabilities for mapping ice sheets. But, the unexpected discovery opened up a new dimension of exploration. Future missions to Greenland and Antarctica could benefit from the breakthrough and could help NASA assess the looming dangers when the city finally resurfaces.
What other secrets lie frozen beneath Greenland’s vast expanse?
A relic of the past, a warning for the future: Camp Century is no longer just history.
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