Secret cold war 'city' buried under ice unexpectedly discovered by NASA

Camp Century detected under the ice by NASA radar Credit: NASA/ AP

NASA scientists have rediscovered an abandoned "city" previously used as a US military base under 100ft of ice, nearly 60 years after it was abandoned.

Camp Century, a relic of the Cold War, was a US army base built in 1959 in Northern Greenland during the height of the nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union.

It became known as the "city under the ice" after it was built by cutting a network of tunnels in the near-surface of the ice sheet with plans to expand. But after just eight years, Camp Century was abandoned in 1967.

Nasa scientist Chad Greene took a photograph out of the plane as he flew over Greenland Credit: Nasa

In April, NASA scientist Chad Greene and agency expert, Alex Gardener, were mapping the ice sheets as they flew over Greenland when they unexpectedly detected the city on their radar.

Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project, said on Wednesday: “We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century.”

“We didn’t know what it was at first.”

After 58 years, the archaic structures had eventually succumbed to the harsh environment and was covered with snow and ice as it was buried under the ice.

“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 JPL.

Past surveys of the area only showed the area as a two-dimensional pattern of the ice sheet compared to today's technology with NASA's UAVAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) which produced maps with more dimensionality.

The radar works like an ultrasound for ice sheets able to map the ice surface and internal layers.

They compared the new radar images of Camp Century with historical maps of the base's planned layout and found the parallel structures aligned with the tunnels built to house multiple facilities for the base.

New radar technology has allowed scientists to see camp century in a way "never seen before" Credit: NASA

Greene said: “Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet’s internal layers and the ice-bed interface."

“Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to project rates of sea level rise."

Scientists hope that the radar used to capture the images of Camp Century earlier this year will allow the next generation of mapping ice sheets to take place across Greenland, Antarctica and beyond.

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