In a recent flight over the Greenland ice sheet, NASA scientist Chad Greene accidentally discovered a secret military base.
After taking radar images of the area, Greene was surprised by what he found, which was later confirmed to be Camp Century, a U.S. military base from the Cold War constructed 65 years ago at a depth of 30 meters beneath the massive ice sheet.
“We were looking for the ice sheet, and Camp Century appeared. At first, we didn’t know what it was,” said Alex Gardner, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who directed the project.
Entrance to Camp Century. (Archive photo).
Built secretly by the U.S. military between June 1959 and October 1960, Camp Century, also known as “the city under the ice,” consists of 21 underground tunnels stretching nearly 3,000 meters.
Greene noted that the radar images revealed several distinct structures within the base.
To study this base, NASA used synthetic aperture radar mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVSAR), similar to the LiDAR technology used to search for Maya ruins. The difference is that LiDAR employs laser light, while UAVSAR uses radio waves.
The U.S. and Denmark signed a defense agreement for Greenland in 1951, allowing NATO members to use facilities in Greenland to protect the region and other allied nations.
This agreement permitted the U.S. to establish bases in Greenland. With temperatures dropping to -70 degrees Celsius and winds exceeding 200 km/h, constructing a base on the ice shelf became an extremely challenging task. The camp was built using 6,000 tons of materials, transported by heavy sleds that could only move at a maximum speed of 3 km/h.
Materials were transported by sled to Thule, another U.S. base, with each trip taking 70 hours. The first military engineers dug trenches in the snow and ice before erecting wooden buildings with steel roofs.
The base featured one PM-2 nuclear reactor.
Camp Century was not a secret. The U.S. military even produced a promotional video for this project. However, NASA’s recent discovery has significant implications for nuclear strategy that even the Danish government was unaware of.
Known as “Project Iceworm,” Camp Century was prepared to house ballistic missiles beneath the Greenland ice. The U.S. planned to create over 130,000 km2 of space, enough to accommodate 600 missiles. They also needed to build 60 launch pads and relocate 11,000 soldiers to live in the city beneath the ice.
However, Project Iceworm never came to fruition due to its impracticality. By 1967, Camp Century ceased operations and was abandoned, becoming a cold relic of America’s Cold War efforts. Now, the deserted base has been buried under more snow and ice for the past 57 years.
