An abandoned “city” from the Cold War has been discovered beneath the ice in a radar image captured by NASA scientists in Greenland.
In April 2024, the radar image was captured when scientists and engineers were flying over northern Greenland in NASA’s Gulfstream III jet.
The deserted city belongs to Camp Century, a military installation constructed in 1959 after excavating a network of tunnels below the Greenland ice sheet’s near-surface layer.
The camp, which was abandoned in 1967, was fully covered with snow and ice, enabling the concrete buildings of the complex to lie at least 30 meters (100 feet) below the surface.
Here’s what NASA has to say about new discovery
Speaking on the development, Alex Gardner, who works at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said: “We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn’t know what it was at first.”
Researchers employed NASA’s UAVSAR instrument, which is positioned on the aircraft’s belly and can create “maps with more dimensionality,” during the April flyby, he added.
Meanwhile, Nasa scientist Chad Greene informed that individual structures in the hidden metropolis can be seen in the new data in a way that has never been seen before.
Conventional radar maps were utilised to confirm the depth estimates of Camp Century. Moreover, this computation aids in figuring out whether the camp and any leftover chemical, biological, and radioactive waste buried with it could be exposed again in case of ice melting.
Here’s what researchers expect next with NASA discovery
The goal of this strategy, according to researchers, is to constrain projections of projected increases in sea levels and assist scientists in measuring the degree of thickness of ice sheets in conditions that are similar to Antarctica.
According to Greene, their objective “was to map the ice-bed interface” and the internal strata of the ice sheet after calibrating, validating, and comprehending the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR.
“Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to project rates of sea level rise,” the Nasa scientist said.
Scientists believe the current test survey findings will enable the next phase of aerial mapping in Greenland, Antarctica, and beyond.
