What’s old is new again.
NASA scientists have discovered an underground “city” buried 100 feet beneath the ice of Greenland.
Researchers were shocked when their advanced radar technology detected 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 below the ice by a NASA Gulfstream III in April, according to a press release.
“We were looking for the ice bed and Camp Century came out,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped lead the project. “At first we didn’t know what it was.”
“Our goal was to calibrate, validate and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the inner layers of the ice sheet and the ice bed interface,” said NASA scientist Chad Greene.
The researchers did not 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 more than 3,000 miles of tunnels intended to provide a tactical advantage in a nuclear fight against the Soviet Union.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the massive structure at the request 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 deterrence policy, according to the Washington Post.
Camp Century was initially designed to be three times the size of Denmark (which owns Greenland), spanning 52,000 square miles – and equipped with 2,000 firing positions from which 600 “Iceman missiles” would be launched in the event of a nuclear war with the country. Soviets – a real revolver carved from ice.
The missiles would be launched through “cut and cover” tunnels dug 28 feet below the surface, according to an academic paper titled “The Iceman Who Never Came.”
These 600 missiles would have been enough to destroy 80% of American targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, reported the Washington Post.
These ambitious military plans were kept secret by the Kingdom of Denmark, owner of Greenland. The United States told Danish authorities that the project was intended for scientific research purposes only. The true motivations of “Project Iceworm” were revealed in 1997, reports the Washington Post.
Both Project Iceworm and Camp Century were abandoned in 1967.
In total, the project cost more than $25 billion in today’s dollars and would be decommissioned due to the challenges associated with building under an ever-changing ice sheet.
During his first term as US 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 in the frozen tundra.
