NASA discovers underground ‘city’ beneath ice sheet in Greenland
What’s old is new again.
NASA scientists discovered an underground “city” buried 100 feet beneath the ice of Greenland.
Researchers were shocked when their advanced radar technology picked up signs of human construction deep beneath the ice of the island territory’s tundra, according to the space agency.
Camp Century, an abandoned Cold War-era military installation, was rediscovered 100 feet beneath the ice by a NASA Gulfstream III, back in April, according to a news release.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped lead the project. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
“Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet’s internal layers and the ice-bed interface,” said NASA scientist Chad Greene.
Little did researchers think that they would discover an ambitious military project from the previous millennium.
Camp Century was designed to be a “city under the ice” — with plans for over 3,000 miles of tunnels meant to provide a tactical advantage in a nuclear arms fight against the Soviet Union.
The US Army Corps of Engineers built the massive structure at the behest of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sought to preserve the use of ground deployed nuclear armed missiles as a key part of the nation’s nuclear deterrent policy, according to the Washington Post.
Camp Century was initially drawn up to be three times the size of Denmark (which owns Greenland), sitting at 52,000 square miles — and outfitted with 2,000 firing positions from which 600 “Iceman missiles” would be launched in the case of nuclear war with the Soviets — a veritable revolver carved out of ice.
The missiles would be launched through “cut-and-cover” tunnels, carved 28-feet beneath the surface, according to an academic article titled “The Iceman that Never Came.”
Those 600 missiles would have been enough to destroy 80% of US targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern European, the Washington Post reported.
These sweeping military plans were kept secret from the Kingdom of Denmark, which owns Greenland. The US told Danish officials that the project was purely for scientific research purposes. The real motivations behind “Project Iceworm” were revealed in 1997, the Washington Post reports.
“Project Iceworm” and Camp Century were both abandoned in 1967.
In all the project cost upwards of $25 billion in today’s dollars and would be decommissioned due to the challenges associated with building beneath an ever-shifting ice sheet.
During his first term as US president, Donald Trump floated the idea of purchasing Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark in order to take advantage of the rare and strategic resources that reside on the icy tundra.
