In April of this year, NASA scientist Chad Greene was cruising along in a NASA Gulfstream III (see below) with a team of engineers, monitoring a sophisticated radar system (see below) as it probed the Greenland Ice Sheet below.
At one point in the flight, Greene took a photo from the aircraft’s window showing the vast, barren expanse of the ice sheet’s surface. Not much there. But it holds surprises – a big one in this case. The radar unexpectedly detected something buried within the ice.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice…,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project. “We didn’t know what it was at first.”
Fortunately for this team (and maybe for all of us), the Gulfstream was carrying, NASA’s UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) mounted to the belly of the aircraft. The system looks downward and toward the side, not just straight down as previous systems. This produces maps with more depth and dimensionality. The image turned out to be a lost city.
Yes – a lost city, with a cinema, a post office, and housing for 200 people.
Do I have your interest? A lost city, buried under ice, in a vast expanse of desolate land in Greenland?
The story is covered nicely by this short video clip.
Dubbed the “city under the ice,” Camp Century was a military base built into the Greenland ice sheet by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1959. At the time, it was near the surface layer—now, after snow and ice accumulated over the decades, it’s buried at least 100 feet deep. Back then, Camp Century was advertised as a polar research site, per Popular Science’s Andrew Paul. Its scientists did collect the world’s first ice core samples, which are still referenced in research today, but the facilities also hosted a much darker venture: a top-secret Cold War mission called Project Iceworm.
The classified effort aimed to house and launch a system of missiles within a network of tunnels beneath the ice. The weapons, a type of nuclear missile known as “Iceman,” could launch through the ice sheet, per Space.com’s Brett Tingley. Their potential target was the Soviet Union.
You will find a well-assembled 50-minute documentary about Camp Century in the video linked below:
Left Behind
When the camp was abandoned, the reactor was taken. However, left behind were 9,200 tons of physical waste (building infrastructure), 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, 24,000,000 liters of biological waste, and 1,200,000,000 Bq (unit of radioactivity) of radioactive material were left at Camp Century. Experts believe that the continued degradation of ice sheets will create conditions where this liquid waste will be able to permeate deeper into the ice, possibly into aquifers within the ice sheet, and even the sea.
Project connection
This effort for Camp Century was built under the name Project Iceworm. A project. With a defined start and end date. With a scope, a schedule and a budget. And with an eye towards the future, including its deconstruction and disposal. Well, not really. The plan was that when the Camp was abandoned in 1967, it would remain under ice and the biological and radioactive wastes would stay there forever. At that time, there was little thought given to melting ice. The assumption made was incorrect. In the not-too-distant future, this camp may be (literally) exposed and those wastes (as above) may make it back into aquifers. What goes around…
Long-term and holistic thinking is important for every project. Don’t make your project a Camp Century!
Key takeaway:
Be a project LEADER and think through your project to its use, the use of the product of your project, and even the disassembly and disposal of your project’s infrastructure.
