A staff flying over Greenland this previous April noticed one thing unnatural within the huge ice sheet beneath: an deserted town below the ice. It sounds far-fetched, however the town is actual and more youthful than you could suppose. It’s Camp Century, an army base constructed out underneath Greenland by means of the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers in 1959. The staff’s April 2024 flyby published Camp Century as an aberrational radar sign in an another way desolate swath of Greenland. “We had been on the lookout for the mattress of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” stated Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of the staff, in an Earth Observatory liberate. “We didn’t know what it was once to start with.”
Camp Century was once in-built a frigid a part of the sector, the place temperatures dip to -70° Fahrenheit (-57° Celsius) and wind speeds can exceed 120 miles in line with hour (193 kilometers in line with hour). Nonetheless, the engineering corps constructed a sprawling base that would host 200 squaddies at a time. When Camp Century was once constructed it was once closer to the outside, however the web page was once deserted in 1967. Within the intervening 57 years, a minimum of 100 toes (30 meters) of snow and ice have accrued on best of the web page. The 47,000 gallons of radioactive waste produced by means of Camp Century’s nuclear reactor was once buried at the side of it, in keeping with the Atomic Heritage Basis.
A tunnel in Camp Century in 1966. Picture: Nationwide Archives Even supposing deserted for 6 a long time, the paintings executed at Camp Century continues to expose information about Earth’s historical past. Soil cores recovered from the web page are nonetheless analyzed lately—with strategies that didn’t exist after they had been recovered—to lend a hand inform the tale of Earth’s historic local weather. It’s simple to overlook that thousands and thousands of years in the past, Greenland was once a verdant panorama resplendent with mastodons, horseshoe crabs, piney forests, ducks, and different critters. The cores recovered at Camp Century make clear previous prerequisites on Earth, serving to scientists expect the local weather in our planet’s long run. Despite the fact that Camp Century was once noticed in earlier radar surveys, the April flyby used NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Automobile Artificial Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) to symbol Greenland’s floor. The new staff was once no longer on the lookout for Camp Century on their northern sojourn; they had been checking out out the UAVSAR’s talent to map the inner layers of the ice sheet and the best way the ice sheet meets the ice mattress just about a mile beneath the outside.
“Within the new knowledge, particular person buildings in the name of the game town are visual in some way that they’ve by no means been observed prior to,” stated Chad Greene, additionally a cryospheric scientist at JPL, in the similar liberate. Misplaced towns are normally present in dense rainforest, the place archaeologists employ lidar imaging to peer buildings hidden beneath the dense foliage. Previous this yr, one such staff discovered hundreds of Maya constructions in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. The new survey in Greenland made use of the similar concept to search out Camp Century, despite the fact that it made use of radio waves to decide the positioning of the abandoned web page as an alternative of laser mild.
The brand new radar symbol (on the best of this text) do distort some facets of the web page’s structure. For one, the ice mattress (represented as the skinny inexperienced line operating parallel to the ice’s floor) seems to be above Camp Century, despite the fact that it’s a couple of mile beneath it. The UAVSAR take a look at got here off with out a hitch, and contained an easter egg from the Chilly Conflict. Despite the fact that there are issues that melting of Greenland’s ice sheet may just re-expose the camp and the quite a lot of wastes inside of (together with radioactive and organic), for now the picture is a unusual reminder of our nation’s army historical past.
