A “secret city” has just been rediscovered in the ice of Greenland
As a NASA plane flies over Greenland, “something buried under the ice” unexpectedly reappears.
Last April, a NASA scientist, accompanied by a team of engineers, spotted something unusual in Greenland's ice cap. At an altitude of 250km above the north of the territory, the radar used by Chad Greene to probe the ice cap detected a “shape buried under the ice”.
Alex Gardner, NASA cryosphere expert, explains in a press release: “We discovered Camp Century. At first, we didn't know what it was.” Camp Century is a military base built in 1959 by American engineers, who had then dug a network of tunnels under the ice, in the surface layer of the ice cap. Also known as the “city under the ice”, this base is a relic of the Cold War, as TF1 info points out. USA Today added that “the base housed between 85 and 200 soldiers and was powered by a nuclear reactor”.
Abandoned in 1967, Camp Century has been covered by ice and snow, which have continued to accumulate. As a result, the associated infrastructure lies some 30 meters beneath the ice.
Thanks to the radar, scientists were able to collect enough data to highlight “the structures of the secret city, visible as they had never been before”. The US agency points out that, when comparing the new radar map of Camp Century with historical maps of the military base, the parallel structures appear to align with tunnels built to house a range of facilities.
(MH with AsD - Source: TF1 info - Illustration: Unsplash)