NASA captures unprecedented view of secret US military 'city under the ice'

A NASA scientist has captured an unprecedented view of a secret US military research base that is known as the "city under the ice".

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That NASA scientist is Chad Greene, who was joined by other NASA engineers who were conducting testing on the Greenland Ice Sheet with a radar instrument, which gathers valuable data by beaming out radio waves at a target and measuring how long it takes for them to get back to the instrument. By doing this, researchers are able to map the surface of ice sheets, and what's beneath them. Using NASA's UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) mounted to the belly of the aircraft, researchers detected signs of a base beneath the ice.

The team corroborated the radar data with the known coordinates of Camp Century, otherwise known as the "city under the ice". This scientific military base was drilled directly into the ice sheet of Greenland and was used during the Cold War as an outpost to conduct experiments on creating nuclear missiles capable of hitting the Soviet Union across Greenland. Camp Century is now approximately 100 feet below the surface, and the evidence of the base gathered recently by NASA scientists lines up with the historical maps of the base's planned layout, such as underground parallel structures used for all of the base's many facilities.

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Captured April, 2024

"In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before," said Greene, also a cryospheric scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century," said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project. "We didn't know what it was at first."