NASA spots strange structure lurking 100 feet below Greenland ice sheet

NASA has discovered something strange and unexpected buried deep below the ice sheet of Greenland. Chad Greene and his team have found a top-secret US military base that was built in 1959. Known as Camp Century, it acted as a testing site for the deployment of nuclear missiles from the Arctic.

They accidentally stumbled upon the structure while flying above northern Greenland in a Gulfstream III in April of this year. As they were monitoring radar information, they noted something buried beneath the ice about 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base.

“We didn’t know what it was at first,” cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said.

When the radar imagery was studied, a massive structure revealed itself from deep beneath the frozen land.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice,” Gardner said, “and out pops Camp Century.”

Camp Century was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers within the Greenland Ice Sheet. It didn't remain in service for long and was decommissioned after just eight years. Since abandoned beneath Greenland’s ice sheet, Camp Century is like a ghost from the past.

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Camp Century in Greenland

This "city under the ice" consists of a network of tunnels. The Cold War relic now lies nearly 100 feet under snow and ice which has been accumulating since the base was decommissioned.

Several aircraft had caught hints of a structure under the ice in Greenland in the past as well. Using ground-penetrating radar, they detected hints of something lurking underground. However, nothing was ever confirmed.

But the NASA team had access to improved technology. The space agency’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), a radar system mounted under the aircraft offered enhanced radar imaging capabilities.

Greene said the data showed it in a way that had never happened before. “In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before," he said.

The team at JPL successfully corroborated their radar images with historical maps, confirming the presence of Camp Century and its several tunnels and other features.