Under the Ice NASA scientists collected some marvelous readings while flying over the arctic ice in Greenland during an April 2024 survey.
The extremely remote outpost, dubbed Camp Century, includes a massive network of tunnels dug into the surface layers of the ice roughly 150 miles inland.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner in a statement.
The discovery of Camp Century was an entirely unexpected outcome for the team.
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“At first, we were unsure of its nature. “.”.
below the ice.
During a survey in April 2024, NASA scientists flew over Greenland’s arctic ice and took some amazing readings.
The radar system aboard NASA’s Gulfstream III aircraft detected a “city under the ice” that had been used as a military base by the US Army Corps of Engineers during the Cold War.
Camp Century is an incredibly remote outpost that is about 150 miles inland and has a vast network of tunnels carved into the ice’s surface layers. The location was used to test the viability of launching nuclear missiles from the Arctic between 1959 and 1967.
During the more recent flight, radar data revealed several structures extending into the icy surface beneath a 100-foot layer of snow and ice that had accumulated over the previous 56 years.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner said in a statement, “We were searching for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century.”. At first, we were unsure of what it was. “.
Unexpected Discovery.
The information was gathered by NASA’s UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar), which was installed on the belly of the Gulfstream III.
According to a statement from NASA scientist Chad Greene, who was on board the aircraft during the survey, “individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before in the new data.”.
These maps help scientists predict when the camp may be exposed again as a result of the ice sheet melting, a process that is being accelerated by climate change.
According to experts, the site might begin to be discovered by the end of the century, which could have unforeseen repercussions such as the release of chemicals and radioactive waste materials into the environment.
For the team, finding Camp Century was a completely unexpected result. The main objective of the mission was to investigate how the Arctic is being affected by climate change.
According to Greene, “our objective was to calibrate, validate, and comprehend the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice-bed interface and the internal layers of the ice sheet.”.
“Knowing exactly how the ice sheets will react to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere is impossible without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, which greatly limits our ability to project rates of sea level rise,” he continued.
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