“We Didn’t Know What It Used to be at First.” Buried Underneath Arctic Ice, a Secretive Underground Army Base Emerges in New Radar Photographs – The Debrief

When it first gave the impression of their radar photographs, NASA scientist Chad Greene and his workforce of engineers weren’t certain what they had been seeing.
Flying above northern Greenland in a Gulfstream III in April of this yr, Greene and his team had been tracking radar data amassed from the ice sheet underneath when, about 150 miles east of Pituffik Area Base—previously Thule Air Base and nonetheless the northernmost set up operated by way of the U.S. Armed Forces—they noticed one thing surprising.
The plane’s radar gadget had detected some roughly construction buried underneath the ice.
“We didn’t know what it was once to start with,” recalled cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Within the radar imagery, what looked to be a large construction have been printed deep underneath the frozen panorama.
“We had been on the lookout for the mattress of the ice,” Gardner mentioned, “and out pops Camp Century.”
A Chilly Battle Relic Reemerges
A faraway U.S. army base as soon as used as a top-secret checking out web site for the deployment of nuclear missiles from the Arctic, Camp Century was once built by way of the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers inside the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959. Final in use for not up to a decade, the bottom was once decommissioned after simply 8 years and deserted underneath Greenland’s frozen panorama.
Often referred to as the “town below the ice,” this forgotten Chilly Battle relic is composed of a community of tunnels hewn into the near-surface parts of the ice sheet. As of late, the remnants of the secretive base lay hidden underneath just about 100 toes of snow and ice that experience persevered to acquire because it was once decommissioned.
Above: The approximate location of Camp Century as observed from the Gulfstream III flown by way of Greene, Gardner, and their NASA engineering workforce in April 2024 (Credit score: NASA Earth Observatory).
Rediscovering a Town Beneath the Ice
This wasn’t the primary time the U.S. army’s forgotten Chilly Battle stronghold in Greenland have been detected throughout airborne surveys. Previously, plane the usage of ground-penetrating radar have additionally detected indicators of the hidden underground facility, albeit such as little greater than a small disturbance inside the surrounding deformed layers of ice.
Not like the ones previous surveys, in April when Greene, Gardner, and their NASA team handed overhead, they had been armed with the gap company’s Uninhabited Aerial Car Artificial Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), a radar gadget fixed at once to the underbelly in their plane that permits enhanced radar imaging functions.
“Within the new information, person buildings in the name of the game town are visual in some way that they’ve by no means been observed sooner than,” Greene mentioned, noting that the cryospheric science workforce from JPL was once effectively in a position to corroborate their radar photographs with ancient maps depicting Camp Century’s sprawling tunnels and different structural options.
A Doable Fear Amid Melting Ice
In line with the knowledge from the radar photographs, the ice mattress the researchers have been learning seems to put just about a mile underneath the outside of the ice, which continues to be a ways underneath Camp Henry, even at its present intensity.
The remnants of Camp Henry’s Chilly Battle actions pose no danger on the abandonned facility’s provide intensity. Then again, as melting continues to put on away the Greenland Ice Sheet, scientists are mindful that it will at some point be uncovered as soon as once more, that means that any radioactive waste and different doubtlessly damaging chemical or organic waste that was once left at the back of when the ability was once decommissioned in 1967 may additionally resurface.

Trench building as observed at Camp Century in 1960 (Credit score: U.S. Military Corps of Engineers, Chilly Areas Analysis and Engineering Laboratory).
Despite the fact that the radar imagery received in April by way of Greene and Gardner may turn out helpful with regards to ongoing tracking of such threats as melting continues, the researchers mentioned the photographs of this forgotten vestige of the Chilly Battle they received came about solely accidentally.
“Our function was once to calibrate, validate, and perceive the functions and barriers of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet’s inside layers and the ice-bed interface,” Greene mentioned.
“With out detailed wisdom of ice thickness, it’s inconceivable to understand how the ice sheets will reply to impulsively warming oceans and setting, a great deal restricting our skill to venture charges of sea stage upward push,” Gardner added.
The radar imagery of Camp Century received by way of Greene and Gardner was once showcased because the Symbol of the Day for November 25, 2024 at NASA’s Earth Observatory website online, as reported by way of Kathryn Hansen with photographs by way of Michala Garrison and Jesse Allen.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Leader and Co-Founding father of The Debrief. He will also be reached by way of electronic mail at micah@thedebrief.org. Practice his paintings at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.

Author: OpenAI