In April 2024, NASA scientist Chad Greene embarked on a mission aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft to study the Greenland Ice Sheet. Flying roughly 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland, Greene and a team of engineers monitored a radar instrument designed to map the ice below. During the flight, the radar unexpectedly revealed something buried deep within the ice: Camp Century.
“We were searching for the base of the ice sheet, and suddenly Camp Century appeared,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and one of the project leaders. Initially, the team wasn’t sure what they had discovered.
Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1959, Camp Century—nicknamed the “city under the ice”—was a Cold War-era military base constructed within tunnels carved into the Greenland Ice Sheet. After its abandonment in 1967, snow and ice continued to accumulate, burying the structures under at least 30 meters (100 feet) of ice.
Using radar, which sends out radio waves and measures the time it takes for them to reflect back, scientists can map ice surfaces, internal layers, and the bedrock below. Previous surveys using ground-penetrating radar detected hints of Camp Century but only produced two-dimensional profiles of the ice.
The April 2024 mission utilized NASA’s advanced UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar), which not only looks downward but also to the side, creating maps with more depth and detail. This allowed the team to identify individual structures of the base more clearly than ever before.
“Comparing the new radar data with historical layouts of Camp Century, we can see that the detected structures align with the original tunnel system,” said Greene. However, interpreting these images remains complex. For instance, the radar also captured the ice bed far below the camp, which appears in the data above the base due to the radar’s perspective.
While the primary goal of the mission was to test UAVSAR’s capabilities for studying ice sheet layers and the ice-bed interface, the discovery of Camp Century provided an unexpected bonus. These advanced mapping tools are also aiding efforts to predict when the melting ice sheet might expose the buried camp, along with any hazardous waste left behind.
“This kind of data is essential for understanding ice sheet behavior and predicting sea level rise,” Gardner explained. “Without detailed ice thickness measurements, we can’t accurately forecast how ice sheets will respond to warming oceans and atmosphere.”
The success of this mission marks a significant step forward in ice mapping technologies, paving the way for future campaigns in Greenland, Antarctica, and beyond.
Source: Earth Observatory.
Also read the publication:
Iceland Elections on November 30: Press Review
