NASA rediscovers Camp Century, the secret base under the Arctic ice

In April 2024, NASA rediscovered a lost “city” dating from the Cold War: Camp Century, a US military base buried under the ice of Greenland. The discovery was made by a team of scientists and engineers led by cryosphere specialist Chad Greene during a flyover of the Greenland ice sheet aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft equipped with cutting-edge radar technology. As a reminder, Greenland, a former Danish colony, is since 1979 a tautonomous territory under the dependence of Denmark.

Camp Century, nicknamed “the city under the ice”, was built in 1959 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The installation comprised a network of tunnels dug into the ice sheet, now located approximately 30 meters below the surface, following Its abandonment in 1967 and the continued accumulation of snow and ice over the decades.

This unexpected return to Camp Century was made possible by NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), an advanced tool providing a multi-dimensional view of the icy underlayers, a feature that conventional radars could not provide. “In the new data, the individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way that has never been seen before” said Chad Greene, according to NASA Earth Observatory. The details revealed by the radar allowed scientists to compare these new images to historical plans of the base, confirming alignment with the original tunnels.

The risks of this military site

Although the scientific utility of this discovery remains to be determined, it raises important questions about the reexposure potential of the site. Scientists are now working to understand how the melting and thinning of the ice sheet could one day re-expose Camp Century and its wastes, including biological, chemical and radioactive materials. The team also discovered that the Camp Century waste covers 55 hectares, the size of 100 football fields. They believe that the site contains 200,000 liters of diesel fuelenough for a car to go around the world 80 times, according to CHERRY.

NASA's initial interest, however, was not the rediscovery of this historic base. As Greene clarified, the real goal was to evaluate the UAVSAR's capabilities to map the inner layers of ice and better understand the interface between sea ice and bedrock. This information is crucial for measuring the thickness of ice sheets and more accurately predict their response to global warming, a key element in estimating future sea level rise.

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