Buried military base with nuclear reactor captured in image by Nasa’s flying radar

SOCIETY

Camp Century was built to enable the large-scale destruction of the Soviet Union, but has long since been buried under snow and ice. Suddenly the base appeared on Nasa’s radar.

Project Iceworm was the cover name for the US Army’s idea to deploy hundreds of ballistic nuclear-armed robots in Greenland, to be able to fire them at the Soviet Union if needed.

As a model for the large-scale expansion, Camp Century was built, not far from the airport in Thule, now renamed Pituffik Space Base.

The base was completed in 1960 and consists, among other things, of 26 tunnels under the ice cap with a total length of about three kilometers, housing, a hospital, a chapel and a small nuclear reactor of the PM-2 model for energy supply.

The base was built under the pretext that it would be used for research, but the real purpose was thus the deployment of nuclear weapons. However, this never happened, mainly because the Greenland ice sheet was judged to be too unstable to be used as a base. Project Iceworm was officially discontinued in 1963 and the base was abandoned in 1967.

In April this year, Nasa flew over the area with a Gulfstream III aircraft. The researchers took pictures of the ice sheet with radar equipment, to determine the thickness of the ice sheet.

Suddenly, an odd formation appeared. The researchers did not know at first that it was Camp Centruy they were seeing. The base is buried under about 30 meters of snow and ice.

The radar used was Nasa’s UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) which provides a three-dimensional image. The base has been photographed previously by Nasa, but then with conventional two-dimensional radar.

– This new data shows individual structures in the secret city in a way we have never seen before, says Chad Green, cryosphere scientist at NASA, in a recent article about the image that the organization has published.

In Camp Century there are large amounts of sewage, diesel and nuclear waste. A question for the researchers is what will happen to the waste as the climate warms and the ice melts.