In April 2024, while flying over northwest Greenland aboard a Gulfstream III business jet, Chad Greene and his fellow NASA scientists spotted an unexpected element. While monitoring radar information about the ice sheet, they realized that some sort of structure was buried beneath the ice, somewhere about 240 kilometers east of the Force's occupied Pituffik (formerly Thule) base. United States Space Agency and known for being the northernmost installation of all those operated by the United States armed forces.
“At first we didn’t know what it was”remembers Alex Gardner, cryosphere specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and member of the expedition. On radar images, a massive structure appeared, buried deep beneath the frozen landscape, as reported by American online media The Debrief. Enough to want to observe more carefully. “We were looking for a bed of ice and that's when Camp Century appeared”adds Alex Gardner.
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Concerns in perspective
Once used as a top-secret underground test site for storing and deploying some 600 nuclear missiles from the Arctic, Camp Century was built by the US military in 1959 in the Greenland ice sheet. But its operation only lasted eight short years. A relic of the Cold War, this network of tunnels was then abandoned and then literally forgotten. Today, the remains of this secret military base lie under nearly 30 meters of snow and ice that have continued to accumulate since it was decommissioned in 1967.
Camp Century had already been detected during aerial surveys. In the past, planes equipped with ground-penetrating radars had indeed been able to detect signs of the existence of this hidden underground installation, through the remaining ice. But unlike previous times, the team of Chad Greene and Alex Gardner had an unmanned aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar (UAVSAR), which significantly improves the quality of radar imagery.
“In these new images, the individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way that has never been seen before”explains Chad Greene, in a press release from NASA Earth Observatory. Also a scientist at JPL, he adds that thanks to these technical devices, it is now possible to observe the tunnel networks of Camp Century without being too disturbed by the thickness of the ice.
While the remnants of Camp Century's Cold War activities currently pose no threat due to the current depth of the abandoned facility, there are concerns for the future. As melting continues to degrade Greenland's ice sheet, scientists are aware that it could one day become exposed to the open air, meaning that radioactive, chemical or biological waste left behind during disposal service of the installation in 1967 could also resurface.
