The special photograph of the underground facility was taken from an airplane with a special type of radar. (Source: NASA)
In Greenland, the US military base Camp Century was closed in 1967.
Today it is under a layer of snow and ice about 30 meters thick.
Almost 60 years later, a NASA image has unintentionally made the base visible in a special way (via Gizmodo).
How was the picture created?
- It is a recording with a so-called
UAVSAR
(Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar
). It was created from a Gulfstream III aircraft. - The background to the recordings is to obtain more precise data about the structures of the ice layers in Greenland.
- Unlike images taken with a traditional ground-penetrating radar, which points straight down and can only create a 2D profile of the ice, a UAVSAR allows you to look sideways in addition to looking down, producing maps with more dimensionality.
NASA's UAVSAR image showing Camp Century. The green line above is the ice bed, which is actually well below the base. Radar reflections reveal a part of it that is far away from the base. (Image: earthobservatory.nasa.gov / Chad Greene)
An old acquaintance turns up unexpectedly
NASA scientist Chad Greene was tasked with monitoring the UAVSAR on the flight. The head of the project in Greenland is Alex Gardner. He describes the circumstances of the unexpected find as follows:
We looked for the bottom of the ice and suddenly Camp Century appeared. We didn't know what it was at first.
Like Greene, Gardner is a cryosphere scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
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Was ist Camp Century?
In the report from earthobservatory.nasa.gov Camp Century is listed as a find from April 2024 Relic from the Cold War
designated.
- The base, built in 1959, is also known as the
City under the ice
known. - It consists of a tunnel network that was cut into the near-surface layer of ice.
- The storage facility may contain biological, chemical and radioactive waste. If the ice layer above them continues to melt, they could eventually be exposed.
This photo gives an idea of the dimensions of Camp Century's tunnel network (source: catalog.archives.gov, image ID 404791598)
The report also states that the comparison of the new radar image matches historical maps of the military base.
This also impresses scientist Greene:
In the new data, individual structures of the Secret City are visible in ways never seen before.
But in view of the scientists' research, the accidental rediscovery of Camp Century is ultimately just an interesting side note.
The actual background of the images
The aim is to predict as precisely as possible the rate at which sea levels will rise. Here's what Gardner says:
Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, severely limiting our ability to predict rates of sea level rise.
A limitation that could potentially be significantly overcome with the data obtained via UAVSAR.
