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A radar image captured by NASA scientists while flying over Greenland reveals an abandoned Cold War-era “city” beneath the ice.

Scientists and engineers captured the radar photograph in April 2024 while flying over northern Greenland aboard NASA’s Gulfstream III aeroplane.

The abandoned city is Camp Century, a military installation constructed in 1959 by connecting a network of tunnels beneath a near-surface layer of the Greenland ice sheet.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn’t know what it was at first,” Alex Gardner from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said.

Abandoned in 1967, snow and ice have accumulated over the camp with the facility’s solid structures now lying at least 30 metres below the surface, researchers say. The latest map revealed the base’s planned layout, including parallel structures that appear to align with the tunnels built to house several facilities.

[image:opovoonline/instagram]

[image:opovoonline/instagram] 

“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” NASA scientist Chad Greene said.

Previous aerial scans of the continent produced a two-dimensional profile of the ice sheet, in contrast to the April flyover, when researchers employed NASA’s UAVSAR equipment mounted to the belly of the aircraft, capable of creating “maps with more dimensionality”.

Maps created with conventional radar were used to validate Camp Century’s depth predictions. This estimate assists in determining when the melting ice may re-expose the camp and any leftover biological, chemical, and radioactive waste buried with it.

 

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A post shared by Camp Century frozen sediment (@campcentury.fossilsunderice)

 

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A post shared by Camp Century frozen sediment (@campcentury.fossilsunderice)

Researchers hope that employing similar equipment would allow them to quantify the thickness of ice sheets in comparable conditions in Antarctica, therefore making projections of future sea level rise more accurate.

“Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to project rates of sea level rise.”

Scientists anticipate that the current test survey results will enable the next generation of aerial mapping in Greenland, Antarctica, and beyond.