NASA Aircraft Uncovers Cold War Nuclear Missile Tunnels Under Greenland Ice

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA scientists conducting surveys of arctic ice sheets in Greenland got an unprecedented view of an abandoned 'city under the ice' built by the U.S. military during the Cold War. During a scientific flight in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet carrying radar instruments to map the depth of the ice sheet and the layers of bedrock below it. The images revealed a new view of Camp Century, a Cold War-era U.S. military base consisting of a series of tunnels carved directly into the ice sheet.

As it turns out, this abandoned 'secret city' was the site of a secret Cold War project known as Project Iceworm [that] called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used [for] nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the Soviet Union. 'We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn't know what it was at first,' said NASA's Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in an agency statement. 'In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before.' 'Weapons, sewage, fuel and other contaminants were buried at Camp Century when it was abandoned, but the thawing Greenland Ice Sheet threatens to unbury these dangerous relics,' reports Space.com. In 2017, the U.S. government issued a statement saying it 'acknowledges the reality of climate change and the risk it poses' and will 'work with the Danish government and the Greenland authorities to settle questions of mutual security' over Camp Century.

Scientists are using Camp Century to serve as a warning and a signpost to measure how climate change is affecting the area. You can learn more about Camp Century in a restored declassified U.S. Army film on YouTube.

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