NASA discovers secret US military base dubbed 'city under the ice' hiding beneath Greenland

All eyes are fixed on what the United States will do next in its conquest to take over Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark, but few people knew until recently that the military actually had a base hidden underneath the ice in the frosty nation.

Natural environments can hide and reveal a wide variety of things over the years as the climate changes, as not only have ancient trees been discovered after ice melted away, but also hints towards a major biblical story thousands of years into the past.

Some of these discoveries weren't necessarily meant to be discovered in the first place though, and often it's to do with various secret programs that major nations have historically undertook as part of global warfare.

One such of these was operated by the United States in Greenland of all places, and what was once a vital Cold War base became forgotten to history, only to be rediscovered accidentally by a NASA scientist.

One NASA scientist accidentally spotted Camp Century hidden underneath the ice while scanning Greenland's ice sheets (NASA)

As shared by the government's space agency, the find was made by NASA scientist Chad Greene, who was flying above Greenland on a Gulfstream III private jet to monitor the ice sheets below.

He snapped a photo around 150 miles east of the Pituffik Space Base simply to observe the ice sheet, but his radar picked up an unusual and unexpected find buried underneath that left him shocked.

"We were looking for the bed of ice and out pops Camp Century," explains Alex Gardner, another lead on the project, adding that they "didn't know what it was at first."

Camp Century was once a military base used during the Cold War by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and it was also known as the 'city under the ice' due to its extensive network of tunnels throughout the near-surface area of Greenland's ice sheet.

Camp Century, or the 'city under the ice' was built for the US army during the Cold War (US Army/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

It was built in 1959, but abandoned just eight years later in 1967, and time has caused the base to drop at least 30 meters (100 feet) below the surface of the sheet, effectively hiding it from view.

Thanks to new technology, scientists are able to see far more of what the secret base has become in the nearly 60 years since it was abandoned, with Greene noting that "in the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before."

While it's unlikely that President Donald Trump has any plans to reinhabit this forgotten relic of a long-distant war in his threats to take over Greenland, but it goes to show that the nation has already had a military presence that could worryingly be reactivated in the near future.