NASA Discovers Abandoned Military Base Under the North Pole
| Article Name : | NASA Discovers Abandoned Military Base Under the North Pole |
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| Publish Date : | February 27, 2025 |
| Author Name : | María Guadalupe Encinas |
| Article Link : | [Download Here Article Link] |
NASA Discovers Abandoned Military Base Under the North Pole
Scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have uncovered a massive abandoned military base beneath the North Pole in Greenland. This discovery happened while they were studying polar ice layers with a high-precision radar, and they certainly didn't expect to find this!
The scientists were working on the study of polar ice layers when, thanks to the high-precision radar, they spotted a buried structure. Upon zooming in on the images, they discovered it was one of the oldest secret military bases of the U.S. Army, used as a testing ground for deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic.
"At first, we didn't know what it was. In the radar images, what seemed to be a massive structure was revealed deep within the icy landscape. Were we looking for the ice bed and found Camp Century?", mentioned Alex Gardner, a cryosphere scientist at NASA's JPL.
Camp Century, also known as the city under the ice, is a relic from the Cold War that was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1959. It was designed to test construction techniques in the Arctic and experiment with the deployment of nuclear weapons, featuring a network of 0.75 miles of interconnected tunnels.
In these tunnels, there were accommodations, a hospital, a laboratory, a chapel, a library, and recreational areas, with a capacity for 200 people. It was powered by the portable nuclear reactor PM-2A, and the site was abandoned in 1967, 98 feet below the surface.
This base was discovered in April 2024, when scientists flew over in the Gulfstream III aircraft equipped with NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR):
Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the internal layers of ice and the ice bed interface. Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it's impossible to know how ice layers will respond to the rapid warming of the oceans and atmosphere, which greatly limits our ability to project sea level rise rates.
"In the new data, the individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way never seen before," the researchers noted, who also consider that this base could be exposed by melting ice at some point in time.
