Many times scientific discoveries are made by accident. NASA scientist Chad Greene took photos “by chance” of a ‘hidden city’ while conducting an aerial study in Greenland.
The expert was monitoring the UAVSAR radar flight while probing the ice sheet in the area and found the abandoned U.S. base Camp Century, considered a relic from the Cold War.
"We were looking for the ice bed and Camp Century appears," said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project. "At first, we didn't know what it was."
What is the 'hidden city' that was found in Greenland?
Flying about 160 kilometers east of the US Space Force's Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland, Greene took a photo from the aircraft window showing the vast and barren expanse of the ice sheet surface. That's how the radar detected something buried within the ice.
It is about Camp Century, also known as 'the city under the ice', and is a relic of the Cold War. The US Army Corps of Engineers built the military base in 1959 by cutting a network of tunnels within the near-surface layer of the ice sheet. After it was abandoned in 1967, snow and ice continued to accumulate, and the solid structures associated with the installation are now at least 30 meters below the surface.
"In the new data, the individual structures of the secret city are visible in a way that they had never been seen before," said Greene, also a cryospheric scientist at JPL. When comparing the new radar map of Camp Century with historical maps of the planned base design, the parallel structures appear to align with the tunnels built to house a series of facilities.