NASA Aircraft Uncovers Cold War Nuclear Missile Tunnels Under Greenland Ice (space.com) 38
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 which called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used to 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 which called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used to 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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He's not lying. He's just that dumb.
Re:Uh, 200 years from now (Score:4, 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.
Re: Uh, 200 years from now (Score:1)
A deal generally means both sides have obligations. The obligations werenâ(TM)t met by the Taliban and Trump said he wasnâ(TM)t going to withdraw as a result, hence why he didnâ(TM)t.
Perhaps you should not believe everything the legacy media propaganda outlets tell you. Youâ(TM)re smarter than to watch The View for your news.
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?
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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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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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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?
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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.
Short movie (Score:5, Interesting)
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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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.
In The Morse Of Madness (Score:4, 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