‘City Under the Ice’ Buried 100 Ft Below Greenland’s Surface Rediscovered by NASA

The remnants of an abandoned U.S. military base in Greenland known as the “city under the ice” have been unexpectedly rediscovered, NASA researchers said.

Camp Century, a Cold War-era military base built in 1959 to serve as a testing ground for “Project Iceworm,” a top secret plan to launch nuclear weapons out of tunnels drilled into the ice, closed operations in 1967 after the military became “aware of how tenuous an atomic city hemmed in by shifting ice seemed,” according to the Washington Post. 

Besides being a nuclear missile site, Camp Century was planned to be scaled to a full city about “three times the size of Denmark,” to house 11,000 service members in 52,000 square miles under the ice, the newspaper reported.

While the grand plans failed and the base was eventually abandoned, the underground city became a topic of interest again in April when NASA scientist Chad Greene, on board a Gulfstream III plane with a group of engineers, stumbled across a surprise.

While using a radar instrument to probe the Greenland Ice Sheet below, the device “unexpectedly detected something buried within the ice,” a press release states.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said NASA cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner, one of the project’s leaders. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”

After it was abandoned, Greenland’s heavy snowfall and low temperatures buried the structures beneath at least 100 feet of ice, the scientists said.

“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” said Greene.

NASA shared the new radar image on social media: