CAMP CENTURY, Greenland (WKRC) – NASA scientists said they’ve found an abandoned “city under the ice” while performing a survey in Greenland.
According to USA Today, two researchers got an unprecedented look at a Cold War-era military facility in April while surveying the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The scientists were flying around 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base, located in northern Greenland, and snapped the above photo from the aircraft’s window, showing the icy expanse.
“That’s when the radar unexpectedly detected something buried within the ice,” NASA wrote.
In a statement recently shared by NASA’s Earth Observatory, Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said the team was unsure of what they were looking at when facility was first detected.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” Gardner said. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
According to NASA, the scientists discovered Camp Century, also known as the “city under the ice,” a Cold War relic.
Camp Century was a military base that was built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1959. Engineers built the base by cutting a network of tunnels into the ice sheet.
The purpose of the facility was to test construction techniques and perform research in the Arctic region, as well as testing America’s ability to deploy nuclear missiles to the Arctic during the Cold War, according to USA Today, which added that the base was powered by a nuclear reactor and could accommodate 85 to 200 soldiers.
Camp Century was abandoned in 1967 after the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the missile launch program, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removing the nuclear reactor from the site, but leaving the other infrastructure and waste behind, per the publication.
According to NASA, snow and ice continued to accumulate over the years, with the solid structures left behind now around 100 feet beneath the surface.
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Publish date : 2024-11-26 18:04:00
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