NASA shows off image “acquired by chance” of U.S. military’s abandoned “city under the ice” in Greenland

As NASA scientist Chad Greene flew over northern Greenland with a group of engineers in April, they by no means anticipated their radar to search out one thing artifical buried deep inside the ice. Greene and his group had been flying above the Greenland Ice Sheet on a NASA Gulfstream III airplane, scanning the barren expanse of ice that’s greater than a mile deep in some areas, when their radar instrument picked up one thing uncommon.

“We didn’t know what it was at first,” Greene stated in a statement launched by NASA’s Earth Observatory this week, together with new photographs of the invention. “We had been on the lookout for the mattress of the ice and out pops Camp Century.”

It seems the group had stumbled upon an deserted Chilly Warfare-era army base constructed by the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers in 1959. Nicknamed the “metropolis underneath the ice,” the compound consists of a community of tunnels carved into the ice sheet. It was deserted in 1967 and, over time, grew to become buried about 100 ft beneath the floor as snow and ice amassed.

The bottom was constructed as a part of Mission Iceworm, a then-secret plan to experiment with constructing a missile launch website underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet in the course of the Chilly Warfare, when pressure soared between the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union. Camp Century, a distant, nuclear-powered set up, was constructed to review the feasibility of such a undertaking, nevertheless it was by no means realized and the bottom was decommissioned underneath the idea it could be buried perpetually underneath the ice.

Whereas the “metropolis underneath the ice” had been picked up by earlier radar scans, the devices used on the NASA flight in April supplied a extra detailed, if sudden, survey.

“Within the new information, particular person constructions within the secret metropolis are seen in a approach that they’ve by no means been seen earlier than,” stated Greene, who works with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Previous scans had used a kind of radar that factors straight down on the floor and produces a two-dimensional scan of constructions buried beneath the ice. Greene’s flight used NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Automobile Artificial Aperture Radar, which is ready to produce maps with “extra dimensionality,” in accordance with the company.

A photograph launched by NASA on Monday confirmed the options of the bottom hidden deep underneath the ice, showing as anomalies close to the bottom of the ice sheet.

“Scientists have used maps acquired with typical radar to corroborate estimates of Camp Century’s depth — a part of an effort to estimate when melting and thinning of the ice sheet might re-expose the camp and any remaining organic, chemical, and radioactive waste that was buried together with it,” NASA’s Earth Observatory stated in its article this week. “The scientific utility of the brand new UAVSAR picture of Camp Century stays to be seen; for now, it stays a novel curiosity acquired by probability.”

A 2016 study of the deserted base instructed that the power might now not be thought of “preserved for eternity,” as a result of local weather change growing the speed at which Arctic ice is melting.

CBS Information’ Walter Cronkite visited Camp Century for a tour of the still-under-construction facility for a program that aired in 1961. The camp’s commander, Captain Tom Evans, defined to him that the objectives of this system had been three-fold: “The primary one is to check out the variety of promising new ideas of polar building. And the second is to offer a extremely sensible subject take a look at of this new nuclear plant. And, lastly, we’re constructing Camp Century to offer a great base, right here, within the inside of Greenland, the place the scientists can stick with it their R&D actions.”

The precise nature of that analysis and improvement work wasn’t mentioned in Cronkite’s report for the CBS documentary present “The Twentieth Century.”  (An abridged model of that report may be seen on the hyperlink above.)

Talking with 60 Minutes in 2016, as that present revisited Cronkite’s decades-old journey to Camp Century, producer Daniel Ruetenik stated the journey was fascinating, and he marveled on the evolution of human curiosity within the huge, frozen expanse of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

“On the time [of Camp Century], the Chilly Warfare was thought of to be the best menace to humanity,” Ruetenik stated. “And now, the realm has turn out to be a vacation spot for local weather scientists attempting to review modifications within the atmosphere. So, it has a second goal now.”