Top-secret Cold War-era military base unearthed
NASA has uncovered an unexpected relic of the Cold War era buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice sheet. Researchers led by Chad Greene have identified Camp Century, a top-secret U.S. military base constructed in 1959, which once served as a testing site for deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic.
The remarkable discovery occurred during a routine radar survey in April 2024, when Greene and his team were flying over northern Greenland aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft. While monitoring radar data, they spotted an anomaly buried nearly 100 feet below the ice, approximately 150 miles east of the Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Base.
“We didn’t know what it was at first,” explained Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
A ghost from the past emerges
Upon closer analysis of radar imagery, the NASA team revealed a massive structure hidden beneath the frozen expanse.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice,” Gardner noted. “And out pops Camp Century.”
Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Camp Century was a complex network of tunnels and facilities constructed within the Greenland ice sheet. It operated for only eight years before being decommissioned, leaving it entombed under layers of snow and ice that have since accumulated.
The “city under the ice”
Camp Century was famously referred to as a “city under the ice.” The Cold War relic now lies nearly 100 feet below the surface. Over the years, aircraft equipped with ground-penetrating radar had detected hints of an underground structure in Greenland, but the findings were inconclusive—until now.
NASA’s state-of-the-art Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) system provided unprecedented imaging capabilities. Mounted beneath their aircraft, this advanced radar system offered detailed insights, capturing individual structures within the buried base.
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” Greene said.
Historical maps confirm findings
To validate their discovery, the JPL team cross-referenced the radar images with historical maps of Camp Century. This corroboration confirmed the existence of the base, including its intricate tunnel systems and other features.
Camp Century, once a symbol of Cold War ingenuity and ambition, remains frozen in time beneath Greenland’s ice sheet. With improved radar technology shedding new light on its secrets, the discovery stands as a testament to NASA’s ever-evolving scientific capabilities.
