NASA scientists have found the remains of a U.S. military base buried 100 feet below the surface of the ice in Greenland.
Camp Century, as it was called, was a Cold War-era satellite for the U.S. Army used as a front for a planned arsenal of nuclear missiles.
While the plan never came to fruition and the base was shortly abandoned, there are still thousands of gallons of nuclear waste buried beneath the ice.
Over the years, we’ve dug up a lot of stuff buried underneath layers upon layers of ice. Ancient tools, animal corpses, World War II planes, volcanos—you name it, ice has buried it, and we’ve found it.
During an April flight over the Greenland Ice Sheet, NASA scientist Chad Greene added a pretty surprising entrant to that list: a secret military base. After taking radar images of the ice, Greene was surprised to see what was shortly thereafter confirmed to be Camp Century—a 65-year-old Cold War United States military base buried 100 feet deep in the massive ice sheet.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
Built in secret between June of 1959 and October of 1960 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Camp Century—also known as “the city under the ice”—was comprised of 21 underground tunnels spanning 9,800 feet, according to Interesting Engineering. In radar images of the site, Greene said, many of the base’s individual structures are clearly discernable. To study the base, NASA used Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), a technology similar to LiDAR that is commonly used in searching for hidden structures like Maya ruins. The difference is that where LiDAR uses laser light, UAVSAR uses radio waves.
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Article URL : https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-found-secret-military-buried-160000867.html