NASA’s impressive discovery of a “city” buried under ice in the Arctic

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as JAR discovered an ancient “city under the ice” in the Arctic more precisely in Greenland.

It’s a Cold War military base of which there were traces, but which, after being abandoned, was completely hidden under layers of ice.

The site, which is called Camp Century was accidentally identified by a team of engineers flying aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft to monitor a radar instrument and survey the Greenland ice sheet. Although the discovery took place in April this year, NASA announced it this week.

Camp Century, built in 1959, belonged to the U.S. Army during the Cold War describes the JAR .

The base was part of the Ice Worm Project a secret mission that sought to install a network of missile launch sites beneath the ice of Greenland, as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union rose.

To build this “city,” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dug a network of tunnels into the near-surface ice sheet.

However, after Project Iceworm failed for various reasons, Camp Century was completely abandoned by 1967. Over time, snow and ice accumulated and covered the base until it was buried approximately 30 meters below the surface.

In the past, other aerial flights flying over this region of Greenland had managed to identify some signs of the hidden base.

From the space agency they detail that on these occasions a common ground penetrating radar which points toward the ground and can produce a two-dimensional profile of what was buried in the ice.

The Camp Century discovery was made possible in April this year, when a research flight was carried out about 150 miles east of the Pittufik space base in northern Greenland.

On this occasion, the scientists used a NASA Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) which has the ability to generate maps with greater dimensionality than conventional radars and enabled a much more detailed study.

“We were looking for the ice bed and Camp Century came up. At first we didn’t know what it was. » Alex Gardner, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement.

While Chad Greene, another JPL scientist who participated in this mission, mentioned that “in the new data, the individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way never seen before.” From the plane’s window, Greene managed to take an image that shows some features of the “city under the ice” and structures detected by ground radar.

Then, by comparing the radar map of the base with historical maps of its route, the team discovered that the parallel structures aligned with tunnels built in 1959.

The discovery of this abandoned base also reveals a problem: the melting of ice in the Arctic and the possible mobilization of all buried waste.

One of the wastes that could be the riskiest is a nuclear reactor who was responsible for the power supply to the military base. According to a study published in 2016 the appearance of waste once considered “preserved for eternity” could transform into a “political conflict”.

“Scientists used maps acquired with conventional radar to corroborate depth estimates from Camp Century, part of an effort to estimate when the melting and thinning of the ice sheet could re-expose the camp and everything remaining biological, chemical and radioactive waste who was buried with him,” they said from NASA.