NASA scientists accidentally discovered a massive abandoned Cold War base, during an ice sheet survey over Greenland.
Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist with NASA, was flying above the pure white ice sheets of Greenland in a Gulfstream III plane when he and the accompanying team found the old base. The pilot and coder were monitoring the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) system they were testing when, after taking a photo, they noticed two turquoise dots appear.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in a statement. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
Indeed, that is how it seemed to the scientists, as they suddenly saw turquoise on a radar, which they expected to be mostly blank. While the existence of Camp Century had been documented, this was the first time the base had been seen in such a fashion.
“You can see the scale, you can see the size of it, you can see individual structures and tunnels,” said Greene to SFGATE.
Previous aerial documentation of the site was all in 2-D and did no justice to the sheer scale of Camp Century. However, the scan done by UAVSAR in the Gulfstream III is a comprehensive and detailed 3-D mapping of the old Cold War base.
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” said Greene.
Camp Century was built in 1959 by the US Army Corps of Engineers as part of a clandestine operation to set up 600 intermediate-range ballistic missiles hidden in a long and complex network of tunnels under the ice sheets of Greenland.
The abandoned Cold War base also served another purpose as a doomsday bunker in case of nuclear Armageddon. The base’s tunnels spanned more than 9,000 feet and featured everything one would find in a small city. Camp Century had a hospital, laboratory, chapel, library, and recreational spaces, along with a capacity of 200 people.
The base was powered by a portable nuclear reactor that was easily capable of supplying electricity and necessary heat to make for a relatively comfortable existence in the middle of the Arctic. The base closed shortly after it was established in 1967 because of the instability of Greenland’s ice sheets and was left to be buried in snow never to be seen again.
However, with the rediscovery of the old abandoned Cold War base, scientists hope to reassess the facility. They fear the abandoned Camp Century may now excrete toxic waste because of global warming. As the ice sheets weaken, the base could be exposed to the elements and could release the toxic waste it otherwise would not have had it remained buried.
