NASA scientists have uncovered a hidden relic of the Cold War — a “secret city” buried under the Greenland Ice Sheet, Space.com reports. During a scientific survey in April 2024, NASA’s Gulfstream III aircraft, equipped with radar to map snow depth, revealed the long-forgotten remains of Camp Century, a US military base built in the 1960s.
The base, which had been buried under layers of ice for decades, was part of a secret Cold War project called Project Iceworm. Its purpose was to build 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels in northern Greenland, where nuclear intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) could be concealed and launched into the Soviet Union. “We were looking for ice beds and outcrops of Camp Century. We didn’t know what it was at first,” said Chad Green, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they have never been seen before,” he added.
Camp Century, built in 1959, consisted of tunnels carved into the ice sheet, but was abandoned in 1967 due to high costs and the danger of the tunnels collapsing. The legacy of Project Iceworm now lives on in images captured by NASA. The tunnels were initially designed to house missiles capable of withstanding the stress of being launched through snow.
However, the melting ice sheet now poses a new threat — dangerous artifacts from the base, including weapons, fuel and other contaminants, could soon be exposed to the world. In response, the US government issued a statement in 2017 acknowledging the dangers posed by climate change and pledging to work with Danish and Greenland authorities to address the issue.
Scientists have also warned that melting the Greenland ice sheet could have other effects. “Without detailed information on ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmospheres, limiting our ability to project the rate of sea level rise. will be greatly constrained,” said Alex Gardner, another JPL scientist.
For now, Camp Century is a reminder of the Cold War and an opportunity for scientists to study the effects of climate change on Earth’s ice sheets. NASA plans to use data from these surveys to inform future research into the effects of warming temperatures.