NASA scientists have rediscovered a long-lost “city” buried under 100ft of ice, 58 years after it was abandoned as a US base during the Cold War.
Camp Century, built in 1959 in northwest Greenland, was a never-completed secret launch site for ballistic missiles to reach the Soviet Union.
As ice began to crush the site, the US abandoned the project and left the camp – which could have expanded to 33 bases – to be slowly lost to the elements.
That’s until NASA scientist Chad Greene, helped by agency expert Alex Gardner, flew over Greenland in April this year to map ice sheets and estimate future sea level rise.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Mr Gardner, describing how their radar-detecting structures appeared to align with tunnels built in the base.
“We didn’t know what it was at first,” Mr Gardner added.
While the presence of the base has been known for years and has been detected previously, NASA said the new mapping shows structures “in a way that they’ve never been seen before”.
Officially, Camp Century was created to test sub-ice construction techniques, but the real plan was top secret – creating a hidden launch site in case of conflict with the Soviets.
It was abandoned in 1966, but what the US left behind – an estimated 200,000 litres of diesel oil and sewage – has caused a row over the clean-up.
Greenland has previously called on Denmark – which owns the land – to take responsibility, arguing the Danes agreed to the deal in the first place.
Towards the end of his first term in office president-elect Donald Trump said he was interested in buying Greenland from Denmark, describing it as “essentially a large real estate deal”.
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Greenland may once have been ice-free
With Greenland’s ice sheet melting, the land beneath may reveal gold, rubies, diamonds, coppers, olivine, marble and oil.
Melting means previously out-of-reach energy and minerals are now more accessible – but climate change-driven sea level rise poses an increasing risk to coastal communities around the world.
