Mon Dec 02 23:10:41 UTC 2024: **NASA Radar Reveals Secret Cold War Nuclear Base Buried Under Greenland Ice**
**Washington, D.C.** – A NASA research flight over Greenland’s ice sheet has unexpectedly uncovered a remarkably well-preserved Cold War-era secret military base, Camp Century. Hidden beneath 30 meters (100 feet) of ice, the base, built by the U.S. Army in the late 1950s, housed up to 200 soldiers and was intended as a staging ground for hundreds of nuclear missiles. The discovery was made using advanced radar technology aboard a NASA Gulfstream III jet.
Camp Century, a network of tunnels totaling 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) in length, was abandoned in 1967 after the unstable ice sheet proved unsuitable for its intended purpose. Thousands of tons of waste, including radioactive materials and liquid waste such as fuel and sewage, were left behind. The assumption at the time was that the ice would permanently entomb the waste.
However, with the Greenland ice sheet losing 35 percent of its volume since 1978, scientists are now increasingly concerned about the potential for contamination as the ice melts. The newly revealed high-resolution imagery from NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) provides unprecedented detail of the base’s structure, highlighting the urgency of the situation.
While the immediate focus remains on measuring overall ice sheet thickness to better predict sea-level rise, the discovery of Camp Century underscores the long-term environmental consequences of past actions. The researchers are not currently focusing on remediation efforts, but the discovery raises significant questions about the potential for environmental contamination and the need for future assessment and potential cleanup strategies.
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