NASA Aircraft Uncovers Cold War Nuclear Missile Tunnels Under Greenland Ice (space.com) 72
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA scientists conducting surveys of arctic ice sheets in Greenland got an unprecedented view of an abandoned "city under the ice" built by the U.S. military during the Cold War. During a scientific flight in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet carrying radar instruments to map the depth of the ice sheet and the layers of bedrock below it. The images revealed a new view of Camp Century, a Cold War-era U.S. military base consisting of a series of tunnels carved directly into the ice sheet.
As it turns out, this abandoned "secret city" was the site of a secret Cold War project known as Project Iceworm [that] called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used [for] nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the Soviet Union. "We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn't know what it was at first," said NASA's Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in an agency statement. "In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before." "Weapons, sewage, fuel and other contaminants were buried at Camp Century when it was abandoned, but the thawing Greenland Ice Sheet threatens to unbury these dangerous relics," reports Space.com. In 2017, the U.S. government issued a statement saying it "acknowledges the reality of climate change and the risk it poses" and will "work with the Danish government and the Greenland authorities to settle questions of mutual security" over Camp Century.
Scientists are using Camp Century to serve as a warning and a signpost to measure how climate change is affecting the area. You can learn more about Camp Century in a restored declassified U.S. Army film on YouTube.
As it turns out, this abandoned "secret city" was the site of a secret Cold War project known as Project Iceworm [that] called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used [for] nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the Soviet Union. "We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn't know what it was at first," said NASA's Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in an agency statement. "In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before." "Weapons, sewage, fuel and other contaminants were buried at Camp Century when it was abandoned, but the thawing Greenland Ice Sheet threatens to unbury these dangerous relics," reports Space.com. In 2017, the U.S. government issued a statement saying it "acknowledges the reality of climate change and the risk it poses" and will "work with the Danish government and the Greenland authorities to settle questions of mutual security" over Camp Century.
Scientists are using Camp Century to serve as a warning and a signpost to measure how climate change is affecting the area. You can learn more about Camp Century in a restored declassified U.S. Army film on YouTube.
Uh, 200 years from now (Score:2, Interesting)
the thawing Greenland Ice Sheet threatens to unbury these dangerous relics
FTFA:
New research suggests that as early as 2090, rates of ice loss at the site could exceed gains from new snowfall. And within a century after that, melting could begin to release waste stored at the camp
So that's assuming that by 2090 ice loss begins to exceed gain, then 100 years after that parts of the base may be exposed.
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Re:Uh, 200 years from now (Score:5, Informative)
Really you ignorant fuck? Trump withdrew from Afghanistan?
Trump made the deal and set the deadline. Are you ignorant or trolling? There's no third option.
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Trump made the deal and set the timeline, but Biden handled the execution of the deal. Now if you want to criticize Trump for making the deal - namely that it was made with the Taliban, and didn't include Afghanistan's security forces, then do it. But don't act like Biden just carried out Trump's plans. Once the pull-out started, the Taliban didn't keep its end of the deal. That created a novel situation, which Biden was then responsible for responding to.
There was fear that not completing the pull-out cou
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No, Biden didn't keep to the deal. Biden explicitly broke the terms of the deal, and then later abruptly decided on an unconditional pullout without destroying all major US military equipment and bases.
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Trump made the deal and set the timeline, but Biden handled the execution of the deal.
The timeline defined how the operation could be executed.
I argue that how Biden responded to the situation he inherited was a resounding disaster, a disaster all of its own, irrespective of if the original deal was bad. He failed to secure US allies in Afghanistan, he failed to provide proper security for the pullout, and he failed to address the fact an entire nation state was about to fall to a radical terrorist group.
Your argument is horseshit. He had no time to do any of those things, and the deal Trump made with the Taliban left all of that equipment there for them to inherit, and they were able to use it to threaten our troops as they departed.
Again, even if Trump left a bad hand, Biden played that bad hand so poorly it's pathetic.
Trump set it up that way on purpose, and you are his useful idiot.
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We can fully, and entirely, bomb the hell out of the Taliban on our way out while we take the equipment.
It's people exactly like you who don't believe keeping their word means anything who broke every treaty we ever signed with the Native Americans.
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We're talking about a terrorist organization that brazenly failed to uphold its side of a negotiated agreement. Standard etiquette and word-keeping says that when one side gloriously throws the middle finger to the deal, the deal is off. That's how deals work. That's especially how deals work when the Taliban is about to fling millions of people into the dark-ages, slaughter our troops, murder our allies, claim our armaments, and overrun a nation state with its military assets. Like, a deal requires both pa
Re: Uh, 200 years from now (Score:4, Interesting)
I love how Biden's list of crimes includes "making us listen to a black woman laugh" but he's ok with Trump committing sexual assault and attempting to overthrow the government.
How fragile can these people get?
Re: Uh, 200 years from now (Score:1)
When was he convicted of sexual assault, again? Was that the woman who insisted she was wearing an outfit that didn't come out for years? The one who said "donut you think rape can be sexy?" before being hustled off-mike?
Just like to check for reference.
And, well, everyone except the drooling class knows the "overthrow the gubbermint" narrative is bullshit now. He said in one part of the speech "fight like hell" and in another "protest peacefully". Assuming you completely don't understand figurative lan
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He LITERALLY did tell them exactly that: tweeted a video immediately to go home.
Here's the link (https://x.com/TaraBull808/status/1862579786088161506) to the tweet he posted THAT DAY telling people to go home and not play into the hands of Democrats...but twitter blocked it? Funny, I wonder why they would do such a thing?
So first he tells them to be peaceful IN THE SPEECH, and then tries to tweet that ...but it was blocked "by someone".
I believe he said fight like hell, it's documented. Then again, these
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"people were begging him to do it immediately and he didn't."
He did, I literally JUST SHOWED YOU.
"Why were they repeatedly telling him over and over for multiple hours to do it if you claim he already did?"
Personally, I *do* think he could have done more. He's an egotistical child who was having a tantrum.
Then again, anything he would have done at that point would have just been used against him later to 'prove' he was in control of the mob.
Gee, think of how much good 10k Natl Guard troops might have done
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Awww, you butt hurt bro,projecting your own ignorant fuck attitude on others, yeh I can lie too, he did support Harris, but otherwise, truth annoying for you sad little retards eh? . Trump negotiated the withdrawl, hindered fixing the border for his own political gain. Every single thing you wrote is either total distortion or flat out lies.
Go fuck yourself, you triggered little knuckle dragging right wight wing moron, waydumberthanshit.
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Afghanistan withdrawal.
Implementing a timeline negotiated by his predecessor (what was his name again?) Certainly there were some missteps.
On the take from foreign powers.
Evidence please.
Stealing hundreds of boxes of classified documents as a Senator and storing some in his garage next to his car.
So much to unpack here. He took them accidentally, admitted it, and invited the authorities to collect them and search his premises for more. Did Trump do that with his set of documents? No, he just took them, bragged to people about having them, and when he was caught, kept lying to the government about what he had. Finally the feds raided Mar-a-Lago with a warrant to recover
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Stealing hundreds of boxes of classified documents as a Senator and storing some in his garage next to his car.
So much to unpack here. He took them accidentally, admitted it, and invited the authorities to collect them and search his premises for more. Did Trump do that with his set of documents? No, he just took them, bragged to people about having them, and when he was caught, kept lying to the government about what he had. Finally the feds raided Mar-a-Lago with a warrant to recover the government property. And it was government property, per the Presidential Records Act (which Trump keeps claiming means the opposite of what it says.)
Forgot to add that it was not "hundreds of boxes." It was 90 documents, 50 of which were classified. [wikipedia.org] They fit in far fewer than "hundreds" of boxes.
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Implementing a timeline negotiated by his predecessor (what was his name again?)
Wrong. Apparently you did not read the agreement. It specifically laid out conditions. One of which was the Taliban cooperating with the central government to create a new unity government. Once the Taliban resumed attacking the central government they had violated the agreement and it was null and void.
Certainly there were some missteps.
Missteps? "Missteps" is ridiculously understating the stupidity of things like removing the military before removing the civilians.
Stealing hundreds of boxes of classified documents as a Senator and storing some in his garage next to his car.
So much to unpack here. He took them accidentally, ...
Wrong. As a Senator he would have only seen some of those documents in a SCI
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Ohh WOW.... you triggered someone really bad :D (re- post from by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ))
I hope it's a bot and not an actual human... that was some impressive unloading of issues....
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Re: Uh, 200 years from now (Score:2)
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12 years of Trump/Vance will turn the country around in the right direction.
So much for the constitution then.
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12 years of Trump/Vance will turn the country around in the right direction.
So much for the constitution then.
Unless you meant 4 years of Trump plus 8 years of Vance, which -- yuck, but never mind.
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It’s also assuming there’s something dangerous still there. Sewage and fuel, isn’t exactly a massive threat if it falls into enemy hands. And if it was abandoned then why are there still “weapons” there, or was that merely creative reporting?
Re: Uh, 200 years from now (Score:2)
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stop reading the articles and be alarmist like the rest!!!
you risk having an informed populace if you continue this way...
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Yes 200 years. This usually happens over millennia. That’s the problem.
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Moreover, the model in question assumes over a 5 degree Celsius global temp rise as well as specific changing weather patterns that won't necessarily occur.
Short movie (Score:5, Interesting)
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PM-2A portable nuclear reactor (Score:3)
A Look Back at the Portable Nuclear Reactor that Sat on Top of the World [radiationeffects.org]
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The link you provided describes how they remove the core, along with the fuel, from the reactor over winter.
They did testing on the empty reactor in 1966 to study the effects of neutron embrittlement in carbon steel.
Nothing left sitting there to melt down.
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Apparently the reactor was dismantled and taken back to the US for disposal, along with a lot of soil around it that had become highly radioactive due to heavy contamination from leaks. If it hadn't been covered up it would doubtless have registered as one of the worst nuclear disasters in US history.
Re: PM-2A portable nuclear reactor (Score:2)
Radar penetrates ice. Can it penetrate dirt? (Score:3)
Can it find tunnels in Gaza and at the Korean & US borders?
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Why is your first thought military purposes? If Israel wanted ground penetrating radar the US would do a wire transfer within the hour.
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I think those have been vastly exaggerated.
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Exaggerated by whom?
Hamas themselves claim over 300 miles of tunnels, and many credible sources do not seem inclined to disagree.
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The "Hamas Command Centre" (TM) is a fabrication to justify bombing hospitals.
They claimed there was a Hezbollah one under a hospital too, but the BBC sent someone there before they could bomb it and found nothing.
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Righty-o
> > > Hamas tunnels are exaggerated
> > Even Hamas say they have lots
> Yeah well Israel bombed a hospital.
That doesn't mean Hamas don't have an awful lot of tunnels which they actually use.
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Had. Israel has surely destroyed them all, along with the civilians and everything else that was there.
In any case, even if this technology could see those tunnels, Israel wouldn't want to use it because then their excuse for committing genocide would evaporate.
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None of that changes whether the claims were exaggerated.
Even Hamas has claimed to have dug a lot of tunnels and they were viewed by respectable news organizations.
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Can it find tunnels in Gaza and at the Korean & US borders?
No. Their instruments only look through ice. There are other instruments that can be used to detect the tunnels that you are worried about; however, there are mitigations in use to prevent those instruments from working.
Long story short, this isn't simple.
In The Morse Of Madness (Score:5, Interesting)
I am forced into comment because men of science have trespassed into that place of green ice, that place of cold war, hidden in the previous century.
Under the sheet and blowing howl in these twisting tunnels here at the 77th parallel once sang on our wireless the cryptic Morse and murmer whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping. Fully conscious we transcribed and indexed the dots and dashes from our little book of secrets. But even before trabslation, the tones for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible.
The results of our remarkable drills, silenced for more than 66 years are now discovered by the electric un-human eyes peering from the heavens, revealing our refuse and suddenly abandoned firearms. My mind tries to make senese of the twisting ghostly images of the tunnels and I am reminded of the strange and disturbing diagrams of the mad Austro-Hungarians, the diagrams Ulam and of the still stranger and more disturbing letters of Teller which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our work: the "hidden city under the ice" [space.com]. But I hesitate with dread to recount the experience of our true and more secret discovery there, and the harrowing escape from those tunnels of madness.
It was our twentieth month hiding under the ice, keeping our terrible secrets. Only our clocks told us when day and night were happening in the world of the living, thousands of kilometers distant. The beeping of the wireless and the clattering of keys from the operator's room down the tunnel from our barracks had become both a comfort and an annoyance. Six times each day the sound came faintly ringing, entering our dissociated daydreaming minds and our vulnerable nightdreaming souls....
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Heat rays huh? (Score:2)
Interesting! (Score:2)
For those interested about Camp Century there is a propaganda video [youtube.com] which tells you much about it which is well complimented by a documentary [youtube.com] on the same topic.
While the feasibility was investigated, Project Iceworm was never implemented by the DoD and was canned after the Cuban Missile crisis. What this means is that there were never any nuclear missiles at the site. However, if somehow there was, do remember that when they left, they were sure to take the reactor that powered the city so the idea that nu
The nuclear waste is a non-threat (Score:2)
People conflate nuclear waste [wikipedia.org] with spent nuclear fuel [wikipedia.org] but these are very different things. Nuclear waste is merely material that has been irradiated (e.g. radiation suits). In this context, it emits a low level of radiation and by the time the waste reaches the ocean, it will no longer be radioactive. The reactor in Camp Century was very low power and only active for six years. There is no reason to believe it had to be refueled which means all the partially spent fuel went with the reactor when they vacate
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If you're not reprocessing it, spent nuclear fuel is high-grade waste.
If you are reprocessing it, you get out some more fuel, and a smaller amount of very high-grade waste.
No matter what, at least part of your spent fuel is waste.
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No matter what, at least part of your spent fuel is waste.
None of which was left behind at Camp Century which was the point I was making.
Meanwhile at the Pentagon.. (Score:2)
Damn it! That NASA has blown our cover again!
We kept this base secret for 70 years and now these jokes blow our cover!!