NASA discover dark secret buried 100ft beneath Greenland ice sheet

Last year, a NASA flyover of Greenland picked up something that had been buried beneath the ice for decades.

Scientist Chad Green and a team of researchers were airborne in a Gulfstream III when he snapped a picture of the seemingly barren icy surface, but the aircraft's radar then bleeped up that it had detected something.

Cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner said they 'didn't know what it was at first', but their fancy radar system, which is able to more accurately map out what's below the surface, revealed 'individual structures in the secret city' beneath the ice.

For NASA, this is more of a rediscovery than a discovery, because what they found were the sunken remains of a secret military base called Camp Century.

Built by the US in 1959, the base was an underground facility which was supposed to be part of a mission called Project Iceworm.

Camp Century under construction in the 1950s, the base was intended to hold nuclear weapons but was ultimately abandoned to the elements (US Army/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

This mission's purpose was to establish a series of hidden military bases where nuclear weapons could be stationed and launched from, giving the US the capability to retaliate in the event it was targeted with a first strike.

The sub-ice complex consisted of a total of 21 tunnels and was powered by a nuclear generator, though no nuclear missiles were ever stationed there and the US never officially asked Denmark whether it could station nukes in Greenland.

The US had told Denmark, which controls Greenland, they'd built the base to test construction techniques in Arctic conditions and hadn't actually got official permission to build it, which caused some headaches for the Danes.

Opened in 1959, Camp Century only lasted a few years as it was shut down in 1967 after they realised that the ice sheet wasn't as stable as they thought, and they couldn't station missiles there.

As such they removed the nuclear reactor, though left nuclear waste at the site, and abandoned the base to become hidden beneath the ice for decades.

The shifting ice has reclaimed the base, but nuclear waste from the reactor that powered it is still buried there (Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

The shifting ice sheets have subsequently destroyed the base, though the powerful NASA instruments were able to get a pretty good look at the remains of Camp Century when the scientists flew over.

Scientists have warned that shifting ice could eventually uncover the camp along with nuclear waste buried beneath the surface, which could mean ecological damage for the area.

Gardner said: "Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to project rates of sea level rise."