While scan the frozen aerofoil of northwesterly Greenland this year , NASA scientist stumbled across a " metropolis under the shabu " from the paranoid years of the Cold War .
The structure wasCamp Century , an abandoned Arctic military enquiry fundament run by the US between 1959 and 1967 during theCold War . It was the hub of Project Iceworm , a design to instal a meshing of atomic missile launching sites veil amid the Arctic Ice Sheet that could hold up a first bang from the Soviet Union .
Nuclear missiles never made it to the camp , fortunately , because they could n’t get license from the Danish government , which still holds sovereignty over Greenland . However , the coordination compound was powered by a nuclear reactor , which left behind alarge amount of radioactive dust , as well as payload of chemical and biological wastefulness .
An image of the radar-beaming plane over Greenland, along with the imagery of Camp Century it captured.Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech via NASA Earth Observatory
The site was abandoned in 1967 and left to be covered by Greenland ’s ceaseless snowfall . This year , however , faint reverberation of the swallow up camp emerged when researchers flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet with a plane that had radar equipment impound to its belly .
“ We were search for the bed of the deoxyephedrine and out pops Camp Century , ” Alex Gardner , project leader and cryospheric scientist at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) , said in astatement .
“ We did n’t know what it was at first , ” Gardner added .
Between 1959 and 1967, Camp Camp was a complex of tunnels and structures, all powered by a nuclear reactor.Image credit:US Army via Wikimedia Commons(Public Domain).
It ’s reckon that the structure of the military readiness are presently at least 30 meters ( 100 animal foot ) below the snow - covered Earth’s surface , shallow enough to be pick up by radiolocation - beaming equipment .
former airborne surveys of Greenland have find signals of Camp Century as they die over the site . However , the recent imagery from April 2024 provides the best view yet .
“ In the new data , private structures in the secret city are seeable in a style that they ’ve never been seen before , ” explain Chad Greene , another cryospheric scientist at JPL .
With warming temperature melt the planet ’s ice sheets , there ’s no warranty the camp ’s ruins will remain buried for long . A2016 studyindicated that the ice shroud on top of Camp Century could rapidly drop within 75 geezerhood under a " business - as - common scenario " of dodo fuel abuse .
If that happens , the report said , it would “ guarantee the eventual remobilization of physical , chemic , biologic , and radiological permissive waste abandoned at the site . ” The investigator went on to paint a picture that the job had the potential difference to set off fiddly political disputes between the Danish government and the US .
It ’s uncertain if or when disaster might strike at Camp Century , but research initiatives like the recent project by NASA JPL could help keep tabs on the position .
“ Without detailed noesis of ice heaviness , it is out of the question to know how the glass sheets will respond to rapidly warming ocean and atmosphere , greatly limiting our ability to project rates of ocean level rise , ” noted Gardner .
