"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century," NASA scientist Chad Greene said after spotting the secret city and Cold War relic in Greenland. Greene and his team were flying over the Greenland Ice Sheet in April, CBS News reports, when their radar showed something. It was a long-abandoned military base built under the ice sheet by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1959, when US-Soviet tensions were high. The base had been decommissioned in 1967 and left to be reclaimed by the ice.
Project Iceworm was an experiment in building a missile launch site under the ice. The nuclear-powered Camp Century was installed to study the feasibility of the project. As many as 200 soldiers and scientists once were housed at the secret site, studying ice core samples. It included a network of tunnels cut into the ice sheet by the corps and an experimental subsurface railway intended to help launch 600 missiles, per SFGate. The project never came to fruition. The structures now are about 100 feet below surface.
Previous radar scans had detected the site, but the instruments used on the Gulfstream III plane in April gave a more detailed view, as NASA showed in an image released this week. The location had been secret but not the existence of some sort of project there; Walter Cronkite took a tour for a CBS News report that aired in 1961. "The scientific utility of the new UAVSAR image of Camp Century remains to be seen; for now, it remains a novel curiosity acquired by chance," NASA wrote. (More Greenland stories.)
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