Camp Century, a U.S. military base in Greenland abandoned since 1967, discovered under ice by NASA

NASA discovered under ice Camp Century, a U.S. military site in Greenland that was built in 1959 and abandoned in 1967.

The find came in April, when a NASA aircraft probing the massive island’s ice sheet picked up on something that turned out to be the base.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn’t know what it was at first,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Alex Gardner said in a release from the NASA Earth Observatory Monday.

While it was near the surface at the time of its construction, Camp Century now lies at least 100 feet below the surface due to the accumulation of snow and ice over the decades since its abandonment.

New radar technology helped flesh out the image of the site,  corresponding with documents showing the base’s layout.

“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” NASA JPL scientist Chad Greene, who was on the flight that picked up on Camp Century in April, said in the release.

The base was capable of housing 200 soldiers and even hosted its own nuclear reactor, which produced at least 47,000 gallons of radioactive waste that are still stored there. 

Originally built as part of an idea to host U.S. nuclear missiles under the ice so they would be in range of the Soviet Union, the project was ultimately found unfeasible and Camp Century was abandoned, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, New Mexico.