A NASA Gulfstream III aircraft, on a mission to measure the thickness of Greenland’s ice cap, stumbled upon a hidden ghost town buried beneath 30 meters of snow and ice. In April 2024, NASA scientists aboard the plane captured the clear outlines of Camp Century, a U.S. Cold War military base that had been abandoned in 1967, concealing tens of thousands of liters of toxic and radioactive waste that everyone believed would be sealed away forever.
Key takeaways
- A scientific radar unintentionally re-discovered a hidden military base buried under ice for nearly six decades
- 21 underground tunnels housed a secret nuclear project that even allies did not know about
- The radioactive and toxic waste left on site could be released as the permafrost thaws
An discovery nobody expected
During a scientific flight in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft glided over Greenland’s ice sheet with radar instruments designed to map ice depth and the bedrock beneath. The goal had nothing to do with military archaeology: the team was testing a new tool, the UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar), a radar technology typically used to uncover concealed structures, somewhat like LiDAR that revealed Maya cities swallowed by jungle.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice, and that’s when Camp Century appeared,” said Alex Gardner, a glaciology researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who contributed to the project. “We didn’t know what it was at first.” The anecdote is striking: a cutting-edge team equipped with state-of-the-art gear unexpectedly rediscovers a secret the United States had buried nearly sixty years earlier. Chad Greene, another JPL scientist involved in the project, noted that the new data show the individual structures of the hidden city as never seen before, thanks to the unprecedented clarity provided by this radar survey.
A city beneath the ice, a weapon hidden beneath
Camp Century was never just a research outpost, even if that is how it was publicly presented at the time. Built in secret between June 1959 and October 1960 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the base comprised 21 underground tunnels spanning roughly three kilometers. It was equipped for total self-sufficiency under the ice: a library, a theater, a medical clinic, a kitchen and dining hall, a chapel, and two power plants—one nuclear and one diesel.
Behind this polished facade lay a far more alarming project. Officially depicted as a polar research center, its true aim was tied to Project Iceworm, a covert mission to house a system of nuclear missiles beneath the ice. The plan called for drilling a network of tunnels about 2,500 miles long under the ice, capable of deploying up to 600 missiles. Remarkably, Camp Century was developed with Denmark’s assent, but Iceworm itself remained secret from the Danish government. Even close allies were not in the know.
The military dream ran up against the physics of the terrain. Iceworm was abandoned after it became clear the ice sheet was not as stable as assumed, making a launch-base concept infeasible. Construction of Camp Century began in 1959, but the base surrendered to the difficulties of preventing tunnel collapses in a perpetually shifting glacier, and it was abandoned in 1967 due to cost and engineering challenges.
A Toxic Heritage We Believed Would Endure Forever
In retrospect, the casual way the army disengaged is striking. In the 1960s, the prevailing assumption was that the ice sheet would take care of the problem: there was no need to manage the waste, because snow would bury and freeze it forever. In 1967, the army evacuated the site, removing the reactor but leaving behind all the infrastructure and operating wastes.
The scale of what was abandoned is staggering. Roughly 9,200 tonnes of physical waste (the building structures), 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, 24 million liters of biological waste, and 1.2 billion becquerels of radioactive materials were left at Camp Century. The PM-2A reactor, deemed highly radioactive, was dismantled and buried in a nuclear waste dump in Idaho, but military records indicate that radioactive cooling water was left in a sump directly inside the Greenland ice.
That past did not stay hidden for long. The sheer volume of waste and the Iceworm project remained in the shadows until 1995, when a Danish foreign-policy investigation, prompted by revelations surrounding the Thule air-base B-52 crash in 1968, eventually brought them to light. Denmark, which had hosted the base on its Greenlandic soil without knowing its nuclear intent, learned of the deception nearly thirty years after the fact.
The real issue today lies in the warming climate. An analysis published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that the waste left in this 136-acre network of tunnels—buildings, an underground rail line, graywater and wastewater, radiological waste, diesel fuel, and PCBs—could someday pose a risk as climate change thins the Greenland ice sheet. A study published in 2016 warned that melting ice threatens to remobilize these hazardous pollutants, even as their creators assumed the relics would be permanently sealed within the ice.
The Greenland ice, once thought to be the planet’s most secure vault, proves to be porous to the passage of time and a changing climate. What NASA’s radar photographed in 2024 is not merely an intriguing Cold War archaeological find; it is a reminder that a buried problem—no matter how deeply hidden under millennia of ice—can always reemerge as a present danger.
Sources: ippsr.msu.edu | science.nasa.gov | allthatsinteresting.com
