Where did NASA radar reveal an abandoned Cold War city under ice?

A radar team conducting a survey over Greenland captured new images of an abandoned Cold War-era city hidden beneath the ice. Camp Century was originally a military base built beneath the surface of Greenland in 1959 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. While it once sat close to the surface, since being abandoned in 1967 more than 100 feet of snow and ice have accumulated over the site.

The team was using NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) when they captured the image. This isn’t the first time a radar survey has spotted Camp Century, but this higher-quality data reveals new details. “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, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The team wasn’t even looking for Camp Century when they stumbled upon it. They had chosen a remote area of Greenland to test UAVSAR’s ability to map the internal layers of the ice sheet and how specifically they interact with the ice bed, which is nearly a mile beneath the surface. “We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, also a cryospheric scientist at JPL. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”