NASA rediscovered secret military base dubbed 'city beneath the ice' hidden underneath Greenland

An American-made disaster could be brewing beneath the ice in Greenland amid the growing diplomatic war of words over the future of the vast Arctic territory.

However, that disaster is not the threatened US military occupation or invasion of the world's largest island, which belongs to Denmark, but a mistake made during the Cold War when it was home to around 10 operational US bases.

This threat was first uncovered by a NASA flyover in 2024, when a routine radar mapping mission noticed part of a vast structure jutting out of the vast expanse of white, as a result of climate change causing Greenland's ice sheets to recede.

Dubbed the 'city under the ice', this large structure turned out to be a long-abandoned military base that was purposely constructed up to 118ft under the ice as part of a secret project to protect America's nuclear capability in case the USSR unleashed armageddon on the US mainland.

Originally built as a self-contained community under the Greenland ice sheet and called Camp Century, the base contained its own dormitories, church, medical center, and even a small nuclear-powered reactor.

At the height of Cold War nuclear armageddon fears, the US built a secret base under Greenland's ice sheet (Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

This small sub-glacial community of military personnel and scientists existed for around seven years, opening in 1960 with the intent of developing construction techniques and data about building under the ice.

This was part of Project Iceworm, a Cold War scheme made public in 1996 that had planned to install several nuclear launch sites under the ice cap so that the US could retaliate should the mainland be taken out via a nuclear first strike.

However, shifts in the ice sheet made building a permanent structure in such a location unfeasible in the long term. In addition to these glacial movements causing tunnels to collapse, sewage issues flooded the underground base with the smell of human faeces.

And it is not just human byproducts festering away under Greenland's glittering fields of ice.

Much of the nuclear and chemical waste produced by its reactor and other operations was buried underneath the ice, which scientists at the time thought could be a permanent way to store the hazardous material.

However, the same climate change that exposed the US' long-forgotten experimental base could also trigger an acute environmental disaster and expose the radioactive material, chemical waste, and diesel fuel entombed under the ice.

Camp Century was a nuclear-powered community that lived under 118ft of ice (NASA)

"What climate change did was press the gas pedal to the floor," University of Colorado climate scientist James white told the Mail.

"The question is whether it's going to come out in hundreds of years, thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years.

"Climate change just means it's going to happen much faster than anyone expected."

International researchers working with the university's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) have estimated that there are around 9200 tonnes of physical waste abandoned at the former Camp Century site.

In addition to barrels of nuclear waste, there are also around 200,000 litres of fuel and significant amounts of a variety of chemicals.

This also includes dangerous polychlorinated biphenyls, an old byproduct of electrical engineering that can cause cancer, damage your immune system, and stall children's development.

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