NASA is known for making many groundbreaking discoveries out in the stars, but sometimes, it finds the unusual here on Earth.
During an April 2024 survey of Greenland, NASA scientist Chad Greene was flying on NASA's Gulfstream III aircraft and snapped an abandoned 'city under the ice.' Scanners also picked up the strange sight and left the team baffled. Was this some ancient city built by a forgotten civilization, had aliens settled here millions of years before humans existed, and why was it abandoned?
None of the answers were quite as dramatic, and instead, NASA stumbled across a forgotten relic of the Cold War that's known as Camp Century.
Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), explained what it was like when Camp Century was spotted so many years after Camp Century was first opened in 1959: "We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn’t know what it was at first."
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The Arctic United States military scientific research base lies some 240 km east of the Pituffik Space Base, and when it was originally opened in 1959, Camp Century was supposed to showcase an affordable way of operating ice-cap military outposts.
With a nuclear reactor to power the 21 tunnels that spanned some 9,800 feet, Camp Century housed around 200 occupants and boasted everything from living quarters to a hospital, a church to a theater.
Camp Century faced logistical problems from the start, with an unstable ice sheet causing the tunnels to compress. After just four years, many of the trenches had been compressed to their design limits, while the reactor was shut down as early as 1963 due to 'unexpected accelerated compression' in its trenches.
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Documents declassified in 1996 revealed how Camp Century was part of the covert Project Iceworm, which aimed to build a vast network of nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet.
The bases of Project Iceworm were supposed to be able to survive a first strike, but after Camp Fistclench served as a prototype from 1957-1960 and Camp Century was ultimately evacuated in 1965, the project fell apart in 1966.
Despite the U.S. government agreeing that subsurface ice camps could be practical, none are known to have been built after Camp Century. Today, only elevated camps are constructed on permanent snow fields.
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These days, the remaining solid structures of Camp Century now sit around 100 feet below the surface due the to continued accumulation of snow. The fact that Camp Century is still buried puts some fears to bed that the nuclear waste and untreated sewage within could be released. Since 2017, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland has worked with the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Program to ensure Camp Century stays where it is…buried under the ice.