After 60 years of sleep and buried under 30 meters of ice, NASA rediscovers a secret military base

An abandoned base

A ghost town, not in the heart of a burning desert, but under the pristine ice of Greenland. This is the surprising discovery made last April by
a NASA team
flying over the immense ice cap. Far from being an ancient city, it is Camp Century, an American military base built in 1959 and abandoned in 1967, now buried under a thick layer of ice.

The team of scientists, using NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), was not specifically looking for Camp Century. Their goal was to test the radar's ability to map the inner layers of the ice sheet and the junction between the ice and bedrock, nearly 1.6 kilometers below. It was during these surveys that the radar signal, abnormal in the middle of the icy expanse, revealed the presence of the base. “We were looking for the ice bed and Camp Century came up,” Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an Earth Observatory release. “At first we didn’t know what it was.”

Built in the midst of the Cold War, Camp Century was a feat of engineering. Despite extreme temperatures reaching -57°C and winds exceeding 193 km/h, the US Army Corps of Engineers managed to create an underground base capable of accommodating up to 200 soldiers. The site housed a nuclear reactor, a source of energy for the base, but also a producer of 47,000 gallons of radioactive waste, buried on site when the base was abandoned, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Today, more than 30 meters of snow and ice cover the site, making it invisible to the naked eye.

A military base that will reopen?

If Camp Century is a relic of the Cold War, its existence continues to interest scientists. Ice cores taken from the site at the time, analyzed today with modern methods, provide valuable information about the Earth's climate history. They bear witness to a green and lush Greenland millions of years ago, populated by mastodons, horseshoe crabs, pine forests and migratory birds. These glacial records allow scientists to better understand past climates and refine predictive models for the future of our planet.

Although Camp Century has been detected by radar before, the data collected by the UAVSAR provides a picture with unprecedented precision. “In the new data, the individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way that they have never been before,” says Chad Greene, also a cryospheric scientist at JPL. The radar image, while revealing the footprint of the base, creates an optical illusion: the ice bed, represented by a thin green line, appears to be located above Camp Century, whereas it is actually more than a kilometer and a half below.

Thanks global warming…

This chance discovery raises questions about the impact of climate change. Accelerated melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet could ultimately expose Camp Century and the waste it contains, including radioactive and biological waste. This scenario, although not imminent, recalls the environmental challenges posed by past human activities, and the need to anticipate the consequences of global warming.

The story of Camp Century is emblematic of an era marked by geopolitical tensions and technological prowess. This base, designed to withstand the extreme conditions of the Arctic, bears witness to the ambition and means deployed during the Cold War. Its rediscovery, thanks to technological advances by NASA, offers us a fascinating insight into the past, while reminding us of the environmental issues of the present and future. The radar image, beyond simple scientific curiosity, is a poignant reminder of the lasting impact of human activities on our planet. The ice, silent guardian of this vestige of the Cold War, could one day reveal all its secrets.