NASA accidentally discovered a secret military base under the thick ice in Greenland

During 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 discovered, which was later confirmed to be Camp Century, a Cold War-era US military base built 65 years ago 30m below the giant ice sheet.

'We were looking for ice sheets and Camp Century came up. At first, we didn't know what it was,' said Alex Gardner, a cryosphere scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who led the project.

Entrance to Century Camp. (Photo courtesy).

Built secretly by the US military from June 1959 to October 1960, Camp Century, also known as the "city under the ice" , includes 21 underground tunnels nearly 3,000m long.

Greene said radar images showed the base had several separate structures.

To study the base, NASA used a drone-mounted synthetic aperture radar (UAVSAR), similar to the LiDAR technology used to search for Mayan ruins. The difference is that LiDAR uses laser light, while UAVSAR uses radio waves.

The United States and Denmark signed the Greenland Defense Agreement in 1951 to allow members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to use facilities in Greenland to protect the territory and other members of the alliance.

The agreement allows the US to build bases in Greenland. With temperatures of -70 degrees Celsius and winds of more than 200 km/h, building a base on the ice shelf is an extremely difficult task. The camp is built from 6,000 tons of materials, transported by heavy snowmobiles that can only move at a maximum speed of 3 km/h.

The materials were transported by snowmobile to Thule, another US base, each trip taking 70 hours. The Army Corps of Engineers first dug trenches in the snow and ice before constructing wooden buildings with steel roofs.

The base has a PM-2 nuclear reactor.

Camp Century is no secret. The US military even made a promotional video for the project. But NASA's new discovery has nuclear strategic implications that even the Danish government is unaware of.

Dubbed 'Project Iceworm ,' Camp Century is being prepared to house ballistic missiles under the Greenland ice sheet. The US plan is to add more than 130,000 ^{square kilometers} , enough to house 600 missiles. The US will also need to build 60 launch pads and house 11,000 soldiers in the city under the ice.

However, Project Iceworm never came to fruition due to lack of feasibility. By 1967, Camp Century was decommissioned and abandoned, becoming a frozen relic of America's Cold War efforts. Now, the abandoned base lies buried under more ice than it has in 57 years.