Mon Dec 02 22:50:35 UTC 2024: ## NASA’s Greenland Ice Sheet Survey Uncovers Lost Cold War Base
**WASHINGTON, D.C. – November 25, 2024** – A serendipitous discovery during a NASA research flight over Greenland has revealed unprecedented detail of Camp Century, a long-abandoned U.S. military base buried under the ice sheet. The high-resolution radar imagery, captured accidentally during a mission to map the ice sheet’s internal structure, shows the base’s tunnels and buildings with clarity never before achieved.
The April 2024 flight, using NASA’s advanced UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar), produced a three-dimensional map of the ice sheet’s subsurface. While scientists were primarily focused on calibrating the instrument and measuring ice thickness, the radar unexpectedly detected the structures of Camp Century, buried approximately 30 meters (100 feet) beneath the surface.
Camp Century, a Cold War-era base built in 1959, was abandoned in 1967 and has since been buried under accumulating snow and ice. Previous surveys detected its presence, but lacked the resolution of the UAVSAR data, which clearly shows the layout of the base, remarkably aligning with historical plans.
“We didn’t know what it was at first,” explained Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Then we realized it was Camp Century. The individual structures are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before.”
While the unexpected discovery is captivating, the primary goal of the mission remains focused on understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet’s response to climate change. The UAVSAR data will improve scientists’ ability to accurately model ice thickness and predict future sea level rise. The detailed mapping of the ice sheet’s internal layers and its base is crucial for understanding how it will respond to warming oceans and atmosphere.
Chad Greene, a NASA scientist involved in the mission, emphasized that the Camp Century images are a “novel curiosity,” a fortunate byproduct of research aimed at improving sea-level rise predictions. The new technology and data will be instrumental in future mapping campaigns in Greenland and Antarctica. The discovery also raises questions about the potential re-emergence of the base and any remaining waste buried there as the ice sheet melts.
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