NASA Spots Details of US Army Base Lost Under Greenland Ice

Deep inside the Greenland ice sheet lies a U.S. military secret that hasn't been seen since the 1960s, but a NASA flyby earlier this year provided an unprecedented glimpse of the buried relic of the War cold.

Camp Century, built in 1959 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was built directly into the Greenland ice sheet, giving it an interior reminiscent of Echo Base on the frozen world of Hoth in The Empire counterattack. At the heart of the facility was the PM-2A portable nuclear reactor, which provided power to the vast “city under the ice” which included housing for 200 soldiers, a theater, a sports hall, a post office, a library and even a chapel.

The planned development of Camp Century click to enlarge

The camp was ostensibly built as a scientific outpost, and work at the facility contributed to modern climate models through ice core drilling, but its real purpose was Project Iceworm, the U.S. Army's plan aiming to deploy hundreds of cold-hardened Minuteman nuclear missiles capable of striking the Soviet Union across the frozen tundra of Greenland.

This never came to fruition, leading to the abandonment of Camp Century in 1967, after which the installation was buried under accumulation of ice and snow. Camp Century is now believed to lie at least 30 meters below the surface.

The only real glimpse of Camp Century over the decades was that of ground-penetrating radar that provided, at best, two-dimensional confirmation that some of the thousands of feet of tunnels, and whatever contents were left behind them , are still there.

That all changed in April, NASA reported this week, when the space agency's Earth Observatory unexpectedly detected an anomaly while conducting a survey of the ice sheet using a aircraft equipped with NASA's Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR).

Camp Century, represented by the green blob, in an image captured by Chad Greene during the mapping flight, click to enlarge

The UAVSAR, which in this case was operated by scientists aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft, has the advantage of projecting radar signals directly downward and at an angle, meaning it is capable of producing maps with more dimensions than a conventional ground-penetrating radar that only aims straight. down.

“We were looking for the ice bed and Camp Century came out,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's JPL and co-leader of the project. “At first we didn’t know what it was.”

Chad Greene, a JPL glaciologist and remote sensing specialist, noted that the incidental image captured by UAVSAR shows individual Camp Century structures that, compared to existing development plans, provide an unprecedented view of the state. of the installation after nearly 60 years under the ice.

“Our goal was to calibrate, validate and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the inner layers of the ice sheet and the ice bed interface,” Greene noted.

That said, although UAVSAR has provided a better understanding of the condition of Camp Century, the images are not perfect. NASA noted that due to the angular nature of part of the capture, a band in the image makes it appear that Century is beneath the ice bed, which is actually miles below the ice cap, much deeper than the ruins of the abandoned facility. The error is due to the tilted radar detecting the ice bed further away, NASA explained.

Why Camp Century still matters

Due to imperfections in the UAVSAR image of Camp Century, the image is “a novel curiosity” rather than useful scientific data, NASA said. However, it is essential to better understand the condition of Camp Century, its depth below the ice and the condition of the frozen water above, because it contains a lot of nuclear, biological and chemical waste that the military does not wasn't too worried. the pre-climate change era.

If current trends in climate change continue, NASA researchers determined in 2011, any harmful substances stored beneath Camp Century's ice could seep into the surrounding ice long before surface melting occurs. begins to show changes.

Surface ice loss predicted by NASA around Camp Century by 2090, click to enlarge

And there are good reasons to be concerned. There's a lot of trash there. According to NASA's estimate, there are approximately 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel, 6.3 million gallons of sewage, including sewage from the camp's years of service, as well as an unknown amount of radioactive waste and PCBs. The Atomic Heritage Foundation estimates that the PM-2A reactor may have created more than 47,000 gallons of low-level radioactive waste over its lifetime, and that that or more is likely buried under the ice as well.

Previous 2D radar images from Century show the presence of buried waste. So scientists know they're there, but without better imaging, they can't know if anything has changed or might start leaking.

A radar capture of Camp Century in 2011 showing what NASA scientists believe to be the waste buried at the abandoned facility, click to enlarge

NASA estimates that, by 2090, climate change could destabilize the Greenland ice sheet above Camp Century, but this does not account for leaching into the ice before surface changes begin.

Camp Century was closed in 1967 after the failure of Project Iceworm, which aimed to build thousands of miles of tunnels to deploy 600 missiles, due to the determination that the Greenland ice sheet was too unstable to support underground facilities in the long term. All that remains to be noted is the presence of the installation today, it is a project led by the governments of Greenland and Denmark to monitor the site from a small outpost above the camp, located 150 miles inland from the US Space Force's Pituffik Space Station. , formerly known as Thule Air Base, where construction of Camp Century was managed.

“Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how ice sheets will respond to rapid warming of the oceans and atmosphere, significantly limiting our ability to predict rates of sea level rise” , Gardner said.

The environmental damage caused by Camp Century may be inevitable as the climate continues to change, likely unabated, unless the world's governments take action. NASA noted that the flight that captured the new Camp Century images “would enable the next generation of mapping campaigns in Greenland, Antarctica and beyond,” but it is unclear whether additional passes over Camp Century are planned to better map the installation.

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