NASA scientists have made a remarkable discovery in Greenland, uncovering an underground "city" buried 100 feet beneath the island's icy surface. Using advanced radar technology, researchers detected signs of human-made structures deep within the tundra. The finding was a surprise, even to the researchers themselves. The discovery was made in April, when a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flew over the area, revealing the remnants of Camp Century, a long-abandoned Cold War-era military base, as per a release by NASA Earth Observatory.
"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn't know what it was at first," said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped lead the project.
About Camp Century
Notably, Camp Century was a secret military project from the previous millennium. Originally designed as a "city under the ice," the ambitious project envisioned a vast network of over 3,000 miles of tunnels, aimed at providing a strategic advantage in the event of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Commissioned by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the US Army Corps of Engineers constructed the massive underground structure as part of the nation's nuclear deterrent policy, which emphasized the importance of ground-deployed nuclear missiles, Washington Post reported.
Camp Century was envisioned as a massive military base, spanning 52,000 square miles, roughly three times the size of Denmark (which owns Greenland) The base was designed to accommodate 2,000 firing positions for 600 "Iceman missiles," which would be launched through tunnels carved 28 feet beneath the surface in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
The sheer scale of the project was staggering, with the potential to destroy 80% of US targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. However, the true purpose of the base was kept hidden from the Danish government, which was told that the project was solely for scientific research. It wasn't until 1997 that the real motivations behind "Project Iceworm" were finally revealed in 1997.
"Project Iceworm" and Camp Century were both abandoned in 1967.
