A team flying over Greenland this past April spotted something unnatural in the vast ice sheet below: an abandoned city under the ice.
The team’s April 2024 flyby revealed Camp Century as an aberrational radar signal in an otherwise desolate swath of Greenland.
Although abandoned for six decades, the work done at Camp Century continues to reveal details about Earth’s history.
The cores recovered at Camp Century shed light on earlier conditions on Earth, helping scientists predict the climate in our planet’s future.
Though Camp Century was spotted in previous radar surveys, the April flyby used NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) to image Greenland’s surface.
An abandoned city beneath the ice was spotted by a team flying over Greenland in April of last year, which is unusual given the size of the ice sheet below.
Contrary to popular belief, the city is real and relatively young. It’s Camp Century, a military installation that the United States constructed beneath Greenland. S. Engineers’ Army Corps, 1959. In an otherwise barren area of Greenland, the team’s flyby in April 2024 identified Camp Century as an aberrant radar signal.
Alex Gardner, a member of the team and cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stated in an Earth Observatory statement, “We were searching for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century.”. At first, we were unsure of what it was. “.”.
The location of Camp Century was extremely cold, with temperatures as low as -70° Fahrenheit (-57° Celsius) and wind gusts of up to 120 miles per hour (193 kilometers per hour). Nevertheless, the engineering corps constructed a large base that could accommodate 200 soldiers simultaneously.
The location was closer to the surface when Camp Century was constructed, but it was abandoned in 1967. The site has accumulated at least 100 feet (30 meters) of snow and ice over the course of the last 57 years. Camp Century’s nuclear reactor produced 47,000 gallons of radioactive waste, which was buried with it, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
The work completed at Camp Century continues to provide insights into Earth’s past despite being abandoned for 60 years. To help tell the story of Earth’s ancient climate, soil cores that were recovered from the site are still analyzed today using techniques that weren’t available when they were recovered. It’s easy to forget that Greenland was a lush, green place with piney forests, horseshoe crabs, mastodons, geese, and other creatures millions of years ago. By providing insight into past Earthly conditions, the cores recovered at Camp Century aid scientists in forecasting the future climate of our planet.
Despite Camp Century’s detection in earlier radar surveys, the April flyby imaged Greenland’s surface using NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR). On their recent trip north, the team wasn’t searching for Camp Century; instead, they were evaluating the UAVSAR’s capacity to map the ice sheet’s internal layers and the point where the ice sheet meets the ice bed, which is located almost a mile below the surface.
A cryospheric scientist at JPL named Chad Greene said in the same release, “In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before.”.
In dense rainforests, where archaeologists use lidar imaging to see structures hidden beneath the dense foliage, lost cities are typically found. In the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, one such team discovered thousands of Maya structures earlier this year. The same concept was used in the most recent survey in Greenland to locate Camp Century, but radio waves rather than laser light were used to pinpoint the location of the abandoned site.
Some elements of the site’s layout are distorted by the new radar image (at the top of this article). One reason is that, despite being roughly a mile below Camp Century, the ice bed—shown by the thin green line parallel to the ice’s surface—looks to be above it.
Without any problems, the UAVSAR test was conducted, and it included a Cold War easter egg. For now, the picture serves as a humorous reminder of our nation’s military past, despite worries that the camp and the different wastes it contains—including biological and radioactive waste—could be re-exposed due to Greenland’s ice sheet melting.
