Back in 1959, the Army Corp of Engineers carved its own Echo Base into the Greenland ice as a testbed for launching nuclear missiles from Arctic locations. The base was abandoned in 1967, but a new scan from NASA shows it’s still sitting 100 feet below the ice — along with all its radioactive waste.
This past April, a team of scientists scanned the Greenland Ice Sheet with airborne radar. They were looking for the base of the ice, but instead found an odd blip on the radar: Camp Century, the Cold War-era secret city built as a “proof of concept” for a nuclear forward operating base. NASA reports:
“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 (JPL), who helped lead the project. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
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“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” said [Chad] Greene, also a cryospheric scientist at JPL. Comparing the new radar map of Camp Century (shown at the top of this page) with historical maps of the base’s planned layout, the parallel structures appear to align with the tunnels built to house an array of facilities.
The scanning flight was intended to map out the ice sheet in order to better determine how it’ll be affected by climate change, which is a real concern for Camp Century. The camp was nuclear-powered in its time, and waste from its reactor still sits buried under the Greenland ice. Scientists have worries that, should climate change affect the ice sheet, that waste could move in unpredictable ways — or even be revealed entirely to the outside world.
Both the United States and Denmark intended the ice itself to be a permanent isolation solution for the waste, but climate change has made that no longer viable. With any luck, these new scans will help researchers better model the effects of our changing world on Camp Century’s buried waste.