© Chad GreeneCamp Century, an abandoned Cold War-era military installation, was rediscovered 100 feet beneath the ice in April.
NASA scientists discovered an underground "city" buried 100 feet beneath the ice of Greenland.
Researchers were shocked when their advanced radar technology picked up signs of human construction deep beneath the ice of the island territory's tundra, according to the space agency.
Camp Century, an abandoned Cold War-era military installation, was rediscovered 100 feet beneath the ice by a NASA Gulfstream III back in April, according to a news release.
"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century," said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped lead the project. "We didn't know what it was at first."
"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," said NASA scientist Chad Greene.
Little did researchers think they would discover an ambitious military project from the previous millennium.
Camp Century was designed to be a "city under the ice" — with plans for over 3,000 miles of tunnels meant to provide a tactical advantage in a nuclear fight against the Soviet Union.
The US Army Corps of Engineers built the massive structure at the behest of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sought to preserve the use of ground-deployed nuclear missiles as a key part of the nation's nuclear deterrent policy, according to the Washington Post.
© Getty ImagesCamp Century was designed with plans for over 3,000 miles of tunnels meant to provide a tactical advantage in a nuclear fight against the Soviet Union.
The missiles would be launched through "cut-and-cover" tunnels, carved 28 feet beneath the surface, according to an academic article titled "The Iceman that Never Came."
Those 600 missiles would have been enough to destroy 80% of US targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Washington Post reported.
These sweeping military plans were kept secret from the Kingdom of Denmark, which owns Greenland. The US told Danish officials that the project was purely for scientific research purposes. The real motivations behind "Project Iceworm" were revealed in 1997, the Washington Post reports.
© NASA Earth Observatory / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn ImagesA novel radar image taken during an April NASA flight reveals structural elements of Camp Century, an abandoned US military base buried within the Greenland ice sheet.
In all, the project cost upward of $25 billion in today's dollars and would be decommissioned due to the challenges associated with building beneath an ever-shifting ice sheet.
During his first term as president, Donald Trump floated the idea of purchasing Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark in order to take advantage of the rare and strategic resources that reside on the icy tundra.
Reader Comments
Add to this, that in an emergency incident in 1968, a US plane found it necessary to drop four plutonium bombs on the ice near the base located about a 100 km west of the former Camp Century. They were not activated of course, but still. Three were recovered and there was a lot of pollution. Officially there were no bombs on Greenland.
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Now, we will have to see what happens in the coming days, and what the investigation will find.
Here are some options, though in some cases the published explanation might differ.
a) a genuine or at least not an intended incident
If it was not unintended, there are more options.
b) a training exercise to check the public response, or the response of administration and its department. A goal of such could be to adapt the population to a situation where an outage happens for defence or offence reasons
c) considering the recent developments with the UK and France showing interest joining up in Ukraine, there is the possibility that someone in power is getting blackmailed, or motivated to take action. This is perhaps a farout possibility, but it can not be entirely excluded.
d) If the investigation comes out with a "finding" that it was a cyber-attack and blames Russia, the question to put is, who benefits? Hint: Not Russia.
Canada Court fingers Opioid pharmaceuticals.
Australia mid-fingers Social Media for <16 year-olds
Vancouver Airport goes Facial Recognition
AGE OF AQUARIUS (not even 1 week done of 20-year Plutonian cycle......
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"In 2016, however, a group of scientists evaluated the environmental impact of the abandoned facility and estimated that due to changing weather patterns over the next few decades, meltwater could release the nuclear waste, 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, a nontrivial quantity of PCBs, and 24 million liters of untreated sewage into the environment as early as the year 2090.[19] Transition in ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is determined plausible within the next 75 years under one climate model, and after another 44 to 88 years the buried wastes could be exposed (between 2135 and 2179"
A 2021 assessment of the future evolution of Camp Century demonstrated that meltwater never reached the base, in fact, it never penetrated more than 1.1 meters. This data supports a determination that there is no chance for remobilization of debris and contaminants before year 2100 and projections have been adjusted with weather measurements from the station at Camp Century.[22] This latter study, used versions of the CanESM2 and RACMO2 climate models that are calibrated to climate observations at Camp Century.
William Colgan, project leader of the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Programme of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, conclusively stated "Since the amount of annual snow will continue to exceed the annual melting, the mapped debris field will continue to be buried deeper in the Greenland ice sheet. In other words: there is no risk that the debris will come to the surface due to melting before 2100"
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100ft on ice.
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Nasa "Past airborne surveys" etc.
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so the only discovery is a more detailed radar system.
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so far as I'm aware Camp century was abandoned but never lost or forgotten.
GPS 🙈 Driving off an unfinished bridge. GOOGLE MAPS 🙈
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and BREAD prices in COURT, Canadian Maple Leaf, 2 Billion $
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