Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

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Posted on 11/26/2024 1:20:36 PM PST by algore

Deep within the ice sheet of Greenland lies a US military secret that hasn't been seen since the 1960s, but a NASA flyover earlier this year has provided an unprecedented look at the buried Cold War relic.

Camp Century, constructed in 1959 by the US Army Corps of Engineers, was built directly into the ice sheet of Greenland, giving it an interior reminiscent of Echo Base on the frozen world of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.

At the heart of the facility was the PM-2A portable nuclear reactor, which provided power for the sprawling "city under the ice" that included housing for 200 soldiers, a theater, gym, post exchange, library, and even a chapel.

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

That never came to fruition, leading to Camp Century's abandonment in 1967, after which the installation was buried under accumulating ice and snow. Camp Century is now believed to be at least 30 meters, or 100 feet, below the surface.

The only real look at Camp Century over the decades has been via ground-penetrating radar that provided, at best, a two-dimensional confirmation that some of the thousands of feet of tunnels, and whatever contents were left behind, are still down there.

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

UAVSAR, which in this case was being operated by scientists onboard a Gulfstream III aircraft, has the advantage of shooting radar signals directly downward and at an angle, meaning it's able to produce maps with more dimensionality than typical ground-penetrating radar that only aims straight down.

"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century," said NASA JPL cryospheric scientist and project co-lead Alex Gardner. "We didn't know what it was at first."

JPL glaciologist and remote sensing specialist Chad Greene noted that the serendipitous image captured by UAVSAR shows individual structures of Camp Century that, when compared to existing layout plans, gives an unprecedented view into the state of the facility after nearly 60 years under the ice.

"Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet's internal layers and the ice-bed interface," Greene noted.

That said, while UAVSAR has granted new insights into the state of Camp Century, the images aren't perfect. NASA noted that, because of the angular nature of part of the capture, a band on the image makes it look like Century is below the ice bed, which is in reality miles below the ice sheet – far deeper than the ruins of the abandoned facility.

The error is due to the angled radar picking up the ice bed further in the distance, NASA explained.

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basically they are clueless, and somehow cannot explain why the Global Warming over the last 60 years has buried this facility under a mile of Ice.

1 posted on 11/26/2024 1:20:36 PM PST by algore

To: algore

2 posted on 11/26/2024 1:23:28 PM PST by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion, or satire, or both.)

To: algore

3 posted on 11/26/2024 1:23:49 PM PST by dp0622 (Tried a coup, a fake tax story, tramp slander, Russia nonsense, impeachment and a virus. They lost.)

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