This Secret Military Base

OVER THE YEARS, WE'VE DUG UP A LOT of stuff buried underneath layers upon layers of ice. Ancient tools, animal corpses, World War II planes—you name it, ice has buried it, and we've found it.

- Connor Lagore

During a 2024 flight over the Greenland Ice Sheet, NASA scientist Chad Greene added a pretty surprising entrant to that list: a classified military base.

Built in secret between June of 1959 and October of 1960 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Camp Century—also known as the “city under the ice”—comprised 21 underground tunnels spanning 9,800 feet, according to the website Interesting Engineering. In radar images of the site, Greene said, many of the base’s individual structures are clearly discernible.

The camp was built from 6,000 tons of material transported via heavy bobsleds that topped out at two miles per hour. Army engineers first dug trenches—the longest of which was a 1,000-foot-long passageway called Main Street—deep in the snow and ice before building out Camp Century with steel-roofed wooden buildings.