### NASA Discovers Cold War-Era Base Buried in Greenland Ice

In a surprising turn of events, NASA scientists examining the Greenland Ice Sheet have uncovered Camp Century, an erstwhile U.S. military installation dating back to the Cold War. The discovery was made in April by two researchers aiming to chart the ice sheet. "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 (JPL) and project leader. Gardner admitted that the team initially didn’t recognize what they had found.

While the base has been detected by radar in previous flights, those surveys employed conventional radar technology. The April expedition utilized an enhanced radar technique called Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, which provided unprecedented clarity. "In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before," said Chad Greene, another cryospheric scientist at JPL involved in the mission.

Camp Century, constructed within the ice sheet in 1959, originally aimed to explore construction methods and conduct scientific studies in the Arctic, according to the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. However, it was also a clandestine site for assessing the possibility of launching nuclear missiles from the Arctic, a reflection of Cold War era anxieties. The base accommodated between 85 and 200 soldiers and was powered by a nuclear reactor.

Research has shown that ice core samples collected from Camp Century remain significant in scientific studies. However, William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University in Toronto and research associate at CIRES, voiced concerns about potential hazards due to climate change. With rising temperatures, the roughly 100 feet of ice covering the base may melt, possibly releasing buried waste into the environment. Colgan noted that climate models predict a shift from net snowfall to net melting at the site as soon as 2090, making the exposure of contaminants inevitable.

CIRES researchers estimate that the base harbors around 136 acres of waste beneath the ice. This includes 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel, 63,000 gallons of wastewater, and an unspecified quantity of low-level radioactive coolant from the base’s nuclear power source. As climate change progresses, the fate of this historical relic raises significant environmental concerns.