NASA discovers underground city beneath ice sheet in Greenland

What’s old is new again.NASA scientists discovered an underground “city” buried 100 feet beneath the ice of Greenland.Researchers were shocked when their advanced radar technology picked up signs of human construction deep beneath the ice of the island territory’s tundra, according to the space agency.Camp Century, an abandoned Cold War-era military installation, was rediscovered 100 feet beneath the ice by a NASA Gulfstream III, back in April, according to a news release.“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped lead the project.“We didn’t know what it was at first.”“Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet’s internal layers and the ice-bed interface,” said NASA scientist Chad Greene.Little did researchers think that they would discover an ambitious military project from the previous millennium.Camp Century was designed to be a “city under the ice” — with plans for over 3,000 miles of tunnels meant to provide a tactical advantage in a nuclear arms fight against the Soviet Union. The US Army Corps of Engineers built the massive structure at the behest of President Dwight D.

Eisenhower, who sought to preserve the use of ground deployed nuclear armed missiles as a key part of the nation’s nuclear deterrent policy, according to the Washington Post.Camp Century was initially drawn up to be three times the size of Denmark (which owns Greenland), sitting at 52,000 square miles — and outfitted with 2,000 firing positions from which 600 “Iceman missiles” would be launched in the case of nuclear war with the Soviets — a veritable revolver carved out of ice.The missiles would be launched through “cut-and-cover” tunnels, carved 28-feet beneath the surface, according to an academic article titled “The Iceman that Never Came.”Those 60...