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California scientists accidentally find nuclear fever dream in Arctic snow

Original article here

NASA’s April 2024 expedition to the Greenland Ice Sheet was supposed to play out like every other geological research mission.

At the time, scientist Chad Greene was soaring above the barren landscape in a Gulfstream III, a small aircraft previously used to transport astronauts returning from Kazakhstan to Houston after completing various space missions. The coder and satellite specialist, along with a team of engineers, was closely monitoring the radar as it mapped the 1,380-mile-long terrain’s hidden, icy layers.

But when they took a photo, they noticed something unusual: a cluster of turquoise dots in a vast expanse of noisy black nothingness that beckoned to them like a siren song.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a scientist at NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a Nov. 25 news release. Though it’s been well documented over the years, their data — captured by an Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar attached to the belly of the aircraft — revealed the lost structure in a way that’s never been seen before.

Part research facility, part war machine, Camp Century was a clandestine, underground military site that once housed up to 200 soldiers and scientists who dutifully studied ice core samples during the height of the Cold War.
Part research facility, part war machine, Camp Century was a clandestine, underground military site that once housed up to 200 soldiers and scientists who dutifully studied ice core samples during the height of the Cold War.

NASA

“You can see the scale, you can see the size of it, you can see individual structures and tunnels,” Greene told SFGATE on Monday. “Really amazing.” The fact that they stumbled across it at all, especially while navigating severe weather conditions leading up to the flight, made their discovery even more remarkable.

Because the environment was so extreme and unpredictable, the research team developed about 25 different flight plans, Greene told SFGATE. As conditions slowly worsened, the scientists anxiously wondered whether they’d be able to collect data at all. But, against these odds, they were finally able to take flight in late April, embarking on a Herculean mission that had been three years in the making — and they just so happened to stumble across a forgotten relic of the Cold War in the process.

Left to right: A view of the main trench to the permanent camp at Camp Century, Greenland; a Peter Snow Miller (a Swiss-made snow removal machine) being used to cut the main trench during the construction of Camp Century, an Arctic United States military scientific research base in Greenland, June 1959.
Left to right: A view of the main trench to the permanent camp at Camp Century, Greenland; a Peter Snow Miller (a Swiss-made snow removal machine) being used to cut the main trench during the construction of Camp Century, an Arctic United States military scientific research base in Greenland, June 1959.

Images via Getty/Illustration by SFGATE

Part research facility, part war machine, the clandestine, underground military site once housed up to 200 soldiers and scientists who dutifully studied ice core samples during the height of the Cold War. The nuclear-powered operation, complete with an experimental subsurface railway ultimately designed to help launch 600 missiles and provide year-round accommodations for its personnel, was supposed to be entombed in snow for eternity after authorities decommissioned it in 1967.

But the bones of “Project Iceworm” may soon reemerge, as scientists worry that global warming will exhume its toxic waste, leading to grave environmental consequences.