A secret city has been found in the ice of Greenland (6 photos)

NASA scientists have accidentally discovered a Cold War military base in Greenland. The abandoned American camp is located at a depth of about 30 meters.





"At first we didn't know what it was," said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The discovery was made while studying the Greenland Ice Sheet. Radar picked up something astonishing - a network of structures, clearly man-made, was hidden under a 30-meter layer of ice.

Eventually, the team realized they had found a long-abandoned Cold War military installation.



"We were looking for the ice bed and found Camp Century," Alex says.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the facility in 1959 by tunneling through the near-surface ice sheet. Nicknamed "the city under the ice," it was abandoned in 1967.





The researchers had no idea that the mission would uncover an ambitious project from the last millennium. Using NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), they obtained a detailed map of the area.

"The new images reveal structures in the hidden city in a way that has never been seen before. Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the interior of the ice sheet and its boundaries," explained scientist Chad Green.



Built by order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the base was officially intended to test construction techniques in harsh Arctic conditions and conduct scientific research. However, in reality, it was a nuclear missile launch site during the Cold War.

The original plan was to house 600 Iceman missiles, capable of destroying 80% of targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. When completed, the city was expected to be three times the size of Denmark and house more than 2,000 firing positions. But the plan was never realized.



The base was abandoned in 1967 when the Joint Chiefs of Staff shut down the missile launch program. The waste, including radioactive waste, remained under the ice. Due to climate change, it could eventually enter the atmosphere.

Canadian scientist William Colgan has found that by 2090, the amount of ice melting in Greenland will no longer be compensated for by snowfall.