While testing a radar instrument in the skies above northern Greenland, NASA researchers accidentally found the City Under the Ice, a long-abandoned Cold War-era military base hidden beneath the frozen landscape otherwise known as Camp Century.
The camp was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1959 and billed as a polar research facility — which was kind of a lie, of course. It was actually home to a secret military operation called Project Iceworm.
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Given the name, you’d think the US military had gotten their hands on a trans-dimensional ice-based Dune-style worm. But no, the truth is much simpler than that, while still being terrifying.
The base was used to store and potentially launch a type of nuclear missile known as an “Iceman” through tunnels beneath the ice to target the Soviet Union. Camp Century was deemed too impractical to maintain and was eventually buried under more than 100 feet of snow as the years passed.
Abandoned in 1967, Camp Century was an engineering marvel of its time. Outfitted with a portable nuclear reactor (which, to calm your nerves, was removed when the base and Project Iceworm were abandoned), the base was built to withstand temperatures as low as -70°F and winds exceeding 120 miles an hour.
Based on the few photos that have been released of Camp Century’s complex innards, it looked a lot like the rebel base on Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.
One thing that should be made clear here is that was never exactly a “secret” base. It got a whole write-up in a February 1960 issue of Popular Science magazine, likely an attempt by the US military-industrial complex to advertise its Cold War operations to strike fear into the heart of the Soviet Union. Propaganda, in other words.
While the US military took the portable nuclear reactor with it, it left behind 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel, 63,000 gallons of wastewater, and a whole bunch of hazardous waste like radioactive coolant.
We’ve known about the base for years but never really gotten too deep a look at it until NASA’s UAVSAR revealed its structures in higher detail than any other aerial photography ever has. And it all seemed to happen by accident, as NASA was testing out UAVSAR’s ability to map the internal layers of the ice sheet, not scouting out decaying military bases.
