Thule Air Base

Photos © 2006 Seth White

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Here is the DC-8, 1962 vintage, which flew us from Baltimore to Thule. Without a doubt the oldest aircraft I have flown on. Our takeoff out of Baltimore on the way up here was just about the stormiest one I have endured. At first it gave me the willies knowing that we were flying through the teeth of the storm in this old plane, with lightning flashes seen (but not heard) at regular intervals. It was a weird cognitive disconnect to realize that these lightning flashes I was seeing were right next to the plane, but that I couldn't hear them. Of course when you are travelling at 75% the speed of sound, this would tend to happen.

One morning while waiting on our helicopter flight to Green Valley, I wandered over to the street next to the helo hangar and saw this view. I didn't realize it until later, but this photo captures my two most vivid mental images of Thule: the piping raised over the roadways and Dundas Mountain. Why? I can't say. Who knows why your memory captures specific images in indellible ink while others are written in dry-erase.

So.....Thule. An ancient Greek word meaning "place", "north", or "unknown", depending on which half-assed internet reference you look at (no, I didn't have time to consult my local professor of ancient Greek). Either way, the concensus seems to be that it IS ancient Greek, and it has some sort of mysterious connotation. Various legends seem to have circulated in the days of yore about the farthest north place...the great unknown northern lands..."Ultima Thule". The great explorer Peter Freuchen named this place when he arrived here in the early 1900's, accompanying the even greater explorer Knud Rasmussen. An apt, very apt, name. This spot was pretty much the northernmost extent of the Inuit people in Greenland, and still is, more or less. And from 1951 until the fall of the Soviet Empire, it was home to arguably the most important military base in the world. This place was, and still is, absolutely unique in the history of the world. The Pyramids, Himalayas, the Holy Land? No. For me, at this point in my life, Thule Air Base was the place in the world I most wanted to see.

So why was I here? Ron Sletten from the U. of Washington is working on a project up here as co-PI of the ICYLANDS project, which is a multidisciplinary, multi-year effort to holistically (my word) characterize the High Arctic terrestrial-atmospheric interface. In this project he is mainly studying the unique soils that form in the polar regions. Last year, Beth (from UNAVCO) went up to Thule for a few weeks and installed GPS monuments at many strategic locations in landscape features. The primary goal was to measure motion of soils. In Arctic and Alpine environments, the down-slope motion of soils plays a primary role in the evolution of the landscape, such as formation of patterned ground features. Patterned ground refers to ground which has developed geometric regularities due to downslope soil motion, freeze- thaw action, and sorting of various sized rocks and pebbles. Neat stuff, and in many places quite dramatic. Another subject of study is solifluction, or flow of water-soaked soils downhill. These soils can actually form distinct fluid streamlines, visible from the air, and often terminate in round lobes at the advancing fronts. So Beth installed and measured the positions of many monuments in 2005. It was my job to folllow up these measurements and obtain the velocity of these points over a year's time. I also assisted in numerous mapping surveys of study areas. This photo is the antenna of the Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) named THU3, which I used as the ultimate reference for all my measurements. The yellow box at the bottom is one of our systems which I installed at an auxilliary monument as a base during some mapping studies. Did you know that solifluction lobes in the High Arctic move a few centimeters per year? Well we measured it during this, the first GPS-based study of such things, so now you know. Amaze your friends at your next garden party with this 10-carat gold nugget of trivia.

This is a montage of the "flat-top" buildings at Thule, which date back to the original base in 1951. Yep, still here, and still in use. This is very much UNLIKE the crappy construction at McMurdo, as evidenced by the fact that zero structures remain at McMurdo from 1955. The main body of Thule Air Base was built in under 3 months, an engineering feat which I have heard compared to the building of the Panama Canal. While I think this is an exaggeration, the reality is that Thule was an astonishign construction and logistical project. This base and the array of long-range radar stations which were built across the Arctic at that time were an incredible achievement. And what's more, the United States no longer has the capability as a nation to pull off this kind of operation. We don't have the industrial and manufacturing capacity to design, fabricate, and build such installations in the short amount of time in which our grandfathers were allowed. We simply cannot do this kind of thing anymore, because we don't know how. And nobody remembers what these men did up here.

By the way, these are my favorite shots from the entire trip by far. I had noticed that the flat-tops were painted in three different colors, and I desperately wanted to capture images of them before I left. I took the photos on my last day, right before my plane left. Ron was extremely generous during the whole trip, and came along as I roamed around town during my last two hours. The colors are actually separated by "blocks". Thule is laid out in a grid, with named streets, and buildings are numbered in increasing order as you move westward. The middle section of the base consists of three levels of these flattops, with our building (#452) being a green flattop in the 400 level.

The local radio station: "5 OZ 20". I only heard it for brief moments while driving around in the truck, so I didn't pick up on what this nomenclature meant. But still, it was cool to hear the "Northernmost FM Stereo Radio Station"...since McMurdo's off-and-on FM station is certainly the southernmost. The similarities and differences between Thule and McMurdo were overwhelming. Everywhere I looked I couldn't help but see things that reminded me of McMurdo, and things that were totally different.

A photo from "C-Launch", one of four missle launch sites which used to defend the air base. These were not ICBM's, but rather surface-to-air missles which were designed to shoot down incoming aircraft. To my knowledge, no ICBM's were ever installed up here. However, the US did toy with the idea of a network of missle sites beneath the Greenland ice sheet, code named "Operation Iceworm". The construction of Camp Century must have been a pilot project for this, and I suspect one reason Iceworm was abandoned was that Camp Century was inadvertently built in an area of higher ice velocity and strain...which squelched ideas for more permanent under-ice installations. Google the term "operation iceworm" if you want to know more about this bizarre but extremely interesting project. Camp Century did yield some very useful scientific results however, including the first deep ice core from the Greenland ice sheet. I wouldn't be surprised if ice from this core is still stored somewhere in the National Ice Core Laboratory, which is right here in Denver at the Federal Center. I actually got a DVD from the Thule Heritage Museum which documented the construction of Camp Century. I watched this one night on my computer, and was absolutely enraptured by the story. I wish I could have been there.

A photo looking toward the ice cap from C-Launch. Up on the ice sheet to the right of this photo was Camp Tutto, a staging area for the construction of Camp Century. They loaded up enormous "Cat Trains" and headed off from Tutto to Century via a ~72 hour traverse. You can still drive up a road from Thule to the old Camp Tutto site. In fact, there are WAY more roads up here than I would have ever imagined. The network of roads built during the heyday of Thule is amazing - hundreds of miles of road across the tundra and permafrost. But sadly we didn't have time to go up the road to Camp Tutto. There is actually a 200 meter tunnel into the permafrost somewhere up there that was built in the old days for research purposes. Ron is proposing to open it up again to do contemporary science within.

As an aside, Joey Barnes is a fellow who lives up in northern Manitoba and makes a living resurrecting old Caterpillar equipment and doing Cat Train tours across the frozen tundra. He calls himself the King Of Obsolete and you can get online here see what he's up to. He wrote me out of the blue a few years back, and we have corresponded on and off ever since. How cool is it to make a living doing what he does? I would love to get up there for a Cat Train tour...but as with most things in life, life keeps getting in the way.

I took this picture as an obligatory action as we were driving along one day. This is the home of Detachment 3, operators of the busiest satellite tracking facility in the world. My buddy Chris actually came up to do work at Thule when he was with Allied Signal...and ended up doing work right here. Bill Spindler, a friend of mine and the inventor of www.southpolestation.com also worked at Thule for some time. I was full of questions for these guys. Bill (and others) have told me that Thule used to be the most dreaded assignment in the Air Force. Basically, you screw the Colonel's daughter, you get shipped to Thule. The pay for the civillian contractors was very poor, and alcoholism was rampant. Probably, all of these things are still true to some degree today, but nonetheless I got a sensed a certain amount of pride among the men there. I talked to a few guys at the base and at the airport going to/from the base, and got the sense that they were proud of the time they'd spent at Thule. I can relate, for sure. Even though I have come to dislike McMurdo, I am extremely proud the work I have done there and the fact that in my own small way, and for better or worse, have contributed to the fabric and history of the place. Anyway, the more I learned about Thule, the more I wanted to come here more. It was kind of a shame that I didn't have time for a tour of Det 3 or BMEWS (Ballistic Missle Early Warning System), but considering I was only here a week and had a daunting amount of work to squeeze in, I feel very fortunate that I was able to see as much as I did.

Here is the current long-range radar installation at Thule, aka BMEWS. Without even knowing what this thing is, it doesn't take a wild imagination to understand that this is a building of some importance. As I understand it, Thule exists now for three main reasons. First, the BMEWS station. Second, the Det 3 satellite tracking station. And third, Thule is still a unique refueling and logistical stop for a huge variety of aircraft operations. Thule was originally built here because it is a wide, flat plane with deep water access. In fact, Knud Rasmussen himself was the first to comment that this spot would be an ideal place for an airport! And not coincidentally, it is also halfway between New York and Moscow. Yeah, a pretty strategic point. Our bombers in the 50's and 60's could hit anywhere in Russia from here, and Comrade Ivan knew this. The aircraft aspect is not such a military advantage today, as evidenced by the fact that Thule is an official US Air Force base with *zero* aircraft permanently stationed here (although it does have a tugboat...go figure). But it is an important location for world aviation, both civillian and military. The Det 3 station still performs a vital satellite tracking role, and the BMEWS station is still an extremely important facility. Important enough, in fact, that it is getting a $700 million upgrade in the coming years. Every other US military installation in Greenland has been decomissioned, but not Thule. Not shockingly, Thule is still a major sticking point in relations between the Denmark, Greenland, and the US.

I seem to recall seeing a book titled "How Thule Won the Cold War". An exaggeration? Maybe, I dunno. I haven't read the book. But I do believe that the presence of this base did tilt the scale in our favor. For those that grew up in the height of the Red Menace, and even those who didn't, try to imagine what it would have been like if the Soviets had built a huge air base at Thule instead of us. Kind of changes the dynamics of the whole situation, no? I am glad that whole era is over with. But then again, which is worse...an enemy we knew and understood (the Big Bad USSR) or an enemy we don't know and don't understand (Militant Fundamentalist Islam?). I believe that a key reason the world never saw full-scale nuclear war is that the two major powers understood each other. The Soviets knew what we were all about, and we knew the same about them. We each knew how far the other would and would not go, and that the other was afraid of being destroyed. However this kind of mutual understanding does not exist today between the "West" and the Militant Islamic.

One of the older buildings at the BMEWS station. Quite the imposing edifice. BMEWS is about 10 miles outside of the main base, perched atop a ridge overlooking a giant fjord nearby. A spectacular spot. An interesting thing about this building is the presence of an array of riser pipes coming up vertically from the ground. This is a frequent feature of buildings around Thule. Normally, when possible, buildings were/are built elevated on posts above the ground. This keeps the heat generated inside the building from warming the ground below and melting the permafrost...which would create an uneven and unstable foundation for the building and cause cracking/sinking/etc. However, for heavier buildings such as the power plant and this structure (whatever it was), mounting the structure on legs was not practical. So, instead they dug down and installed large pipes running underneath the buildings. These pipes have valves on their ends which are opened in the winter and closed in the summer. In winter, the frigid air flows through the pipes and dissipates heat from the structure above, keeping the permafrost soil frozen and stable. Before the summer rolls around the valves are closed, trapping the cold air inside. This moderates the ground warming, again keeping the permafrost frozen. I don't know if they also employ active refrigeration to keep this air cold, but I do know that whatever they do works. Bernard, a co-PI on the project, arrived the last day I was there and pointed out that buildings such as the aircraft hangars which did not have this kind of piping arrangement have very uneven and cracked floors due to settling on the softened permafrost. Some parts of certain hangars are cracked and sloped enough so as to be unusable.

This is an old something-or-other up at the BMEWS site. I wonder if it was a turret for some kind of large radio antenna. Whatever it was, old crap like this takes on an endless fascination for me in places like this. Honestly, there was a heap of rusted out pipes on the way to the harbor that I wanted to photograph but didn't get the chance (dammit).

Thule itself is in a wide, flat valley between two long ridges, North Mountain and South Mountain. There are study sites for the ICYLANDS project on both North Mountain and South Mountain, so we made several trips to each site. This is a random hut sitting on the side of the road on South Mountain. Like I say, I just can't get enough of this stuff.

A small array of antennas up on South Mountain. An interesting fact about Thule is that there used to be a massive antenna on South Mountain, 1000' tall if I remember right. This antenna was used for VLF (very low frequency) communications, to submarines I would imagine. You don't need a huge antenna to receive VLF signals, for example the receiver at McMurdo has elements only ~50 ft. long. However it takes a VERY long antenna to transmit VLF signals. And so they built this damn thing *really* high. The subs themselves would have an equally long antenna trailing out the back end to transmit return messages. And as you might imagine, sending messages over VLF takes is very slow since the frequencies are so low (i.e. audio range). So being verbose (like this webpage) or using big words during VLF comms was surely frowned upon. There are pictures of the giant antenna in the museum, but just foundations are left today. Dundas Mountain is in the background here, and with that flat, round, sloping surface it is one of the most unique and recognizeable landscape features I have seen.

Me, with my official Air Greenland mosquito-net cap. Folks, this was BY FAR the best investment I made in the past year. I bought it at the airport ticket counter in Kangerlussuaq this spring. It has the Air Greenland logo (which is cool) and a mosquito net which packs into a little pouch above the brim (which is cooler yet). And shockingly, considering it was purchased in Greenland, it was really cheap (only $15 or so). Near Thule, on still, calm days, the bugs were absolutely brutal. Welcome to bug season in the Arctic, Seth. I asked Ron one day how bad it can get compared to how it was now. His reply? About four times worse. The legends about swatting your arm and killing 12 mosquitos at a time is not a joke. Thank god Thule is not as bad as many other places. Actually, I have heard that Thule didn't used to have mosquitos in the old days. Evidently, it has warmed enough to let them breed for a short time each year.

A sign by the side of the road. The roads almost never close in the summer, but winter is a different matter.

I had forgotten that the Bartol Research Institute guys operate a cosmic ray station here. But lo and behold, it was sitting in a building a couple doors down from the Perigrine Fund building, where Ron, Birgit, and the rest of the crew had their laboratories. Seeing this stuff made me a bit nostalgic for the Cosray building at McMurdo. Without a doubt one of the very best things about McMurdo is hanging out at Cosray.

The Base Exchange (BX) is the grocery store for the base. Also contained therein is the Arctic Hair barber shop. And here's the sign. Our friend the Arctic Hair even has a regulation buzz haircut.

IT'S MADE OUT OF PEOPLE!!!! I cracked myself up while taking this picture. I showed it around, but strangely, nobody found my Charleton Heston impression nearly as funny. Clearly, these people are humor-impaired. Let's move on.

An old sledge which was used in the building of Camp Century. It sits outside the Thule Heritage Hall. The sledge was rescued last year from the ice cap by a team which included the base commander. Very cool - nice work, sir. A long-standing tradition at Thule is when a passenger flight arrives, the senior staff, including the base commander, line up and greet you as you get off the plane. A handshake and a "Welcome to Thule". How cool is that? I also found out later that my flight to Thule contained the new base commander, who was replacing the guy who'd been there for the past year. I knew immediately who it was...there was one guy on the flight who distinctly projected the "in charge" vibe. I also flew in with a rock band from Louisiana, which was hired to play a few nights at the base, including the July 4th party.

A couple days before I left, Ron and I went to the Thule Heritage Hall, i.e. the museum. We went during a time when the caretakers were there - two Danish guys named Jens and Jens-Peter. Very cool guys, who have each spent many years at Thule and are very much into the history of the place (and preserving it). The Heritage Hall was more a "grassroots" effort than an officially sponsored one, but it has turned out very well. We struck up a conversation with the guys, and Jens-Peter gave us a guided tour of the whole place. This was fantastic - definitely a highlight of the trip. There is a LOT of great stuff in there, and it is EXACTLY the kind of thing that McMurdo needs, since down there you have only scraps of historical items, distributed around in random places. Anyway, the museum was first-rate. They even put together two DVD's of films documenting the construction of Thule ("Operation Blue Jay") and the construction of Camp Century. They also have two photo CD's available. Needless to say I bought one copy of each. Anyway, here is Bernt Balchen, the man largely responsible for the site selection and original planning of the Thule facility. I hadn't heard of him until I stumbled across a book he wrote called "Come North With Me" at a booksale at the Littleton Public Library. After reading it and a biography titled "Bernt Balchen, Polar Aviator", I decided he was one of my heroes. I won't write more except to say that he was one of the most amazing people I have read about, and lived a life which was truly inspring.

Also in the museum: old Cosray equipment!vAfter this stuff was decomissioned, the Heritage Hall guys got wind that it was to be shipped back to the states. Insteadvthey asked if they could have it, and now these things have their own corner of the museum. Note the large barometer on the right, which is nearly identical to the one still in the McMurdo Cosray hut...although this one is in better condition.

And now, relics from a sketchy part of Thule's past. In 1968 a B-52 crashed near the shore just off the tip of South Mountain. In the museum are three hatches recovered from this B-52. The B-52 has four such hatches, and the last one is still at large. I guess they were jettisoned by the crew prior to the crash, and floated ashore later on. The hatches were all found by people out on hikes and were given to the museum for this display.

This B-52 just so happened to be carrying four hydrogen bombs. Three of them were recovered, however the fourth one was *not* recovered. Sooooo. While I was at Thule I heard various things about the incident. Some of it seemed far-fetched, but some of it seemed very believeable. Anyhow, the most credible source I have come across is the Lonely Planet. In my limited experience I have found this guide to be pretty damn good, however I have also run across statements in this line of publications which are simply inaccurate. For example, the 1999 edition of "Greenland and the Arctic" discusses the Thule B-52 crash and metions that local hunters have found Musk Oxen with deformed hooves and seals with no hair, implying that this is related to the plutonium which went missing in that fourth bomb. As far as the Musk Oxen are concerned, a decent population lives nearby in Green Valley, and many of them have deformed hooves because of the lush growth. The hooves of these animals normally wear away as they climb over rocky surfaces, much like rabbits' teeth. But when they traverse soft vegetated terrain for most of their lives, their hooves tend to keep growing and assume deformed shapes. This gets so bad that some of them have trouble walking. In fact, the local authorities have issued hunting permits to kill these older Musk Oxen. We actually talked with the Danish police officer at Thule who was interested in four Musk Oxen carcasses which had been spotted out near Green Valley. He wanted to know if Ron's group knew anything about this or if they could provide any info, since they had been working out there off-and-on during the summer. No, said Ron, but we'd keep any eye out. As he (and we) found out later, permits had indeed been issued for local hunters to kill these Musk Oxen for the exact reason that they were older, and were having trouble with their hooves.

The larger issue in the matter of that B-52 is the medical aftermath of the crash, in particular the cleanup effort. A guy working with the science group told me a wild story about this, but that was twelfth-hand information and completely unreliable. Considering the Lonely Planet as a more reliable source, the word is that a significant number of people involved with the cleanup effort have since died of cancer, or suffered unusual health problems. Is this true? Well yeah, maybe, especially considering that the Lonely Planet reports it wasn't until 1995 that the US government even admitted that the plane had nuclear material onboard. Then, it took an additional 5 years for the government to admit that four hydrogen bombs were onboard. Since only three had been recovered, this meant that the fourth was still at large,vand that between 0.50 and 0.18 kg of plutonium was *missing*. Toxic stuff, this plutonium. Doesn't take much to killvyou. Soooo. Did people get exposed to high levels of radiation during the cleanup effort? I could easily believe this, but I really don't know the whole story. I wish I did.

Editor's Note:

In 2006 I originally wrote that I thought the Lonely Planet and others were wrong in their statement that the relocation of the Inuit from Dundas Village (Uummannaq) to Qaanaaq was forced. I based this on Peter Freuchen's book in which he stated that in the early 1950's, his friends here told him they were already thinking of moving north.

It's now July 2007 and I just spent a week in Qaanaaq. Up there I heard quite a different story about the relocation to Qaanaaq in 1953. People there told me that they were forced to move away, and that they only had three days notice to pack up their belongings and sledge about ~100 km north to Qaanaaq. A very arduous proposition, especially with elderly and young children. However Freuchen's book does cast a bit of a different light on the matter. I just re-read this, and he specifically recounts his conversations with his old friends during his last visit to Thule, which must have been in 1951, 52, or early 53 since the book was published in 1953. His friends told him that many wanted to move north because the hunting had become so poor after the air base was built, as large game just simply would not come anywhere near the place. But in any event, even though people living here were already considering moving north, the decision was ultimately not theirs as it should have been, and the manner in which they were uprooted was simply wrong. And curiously, the order to move came down just days before the Inuit were to be officially granted Danish citizenship!

I also read "The Right To Return", by Aqqaluk Lynge while I was in Qaanaaq. He is a *very* outspoken advocate for Inuit rights and has some strong words to say about this issue. As it turns out the Thule people lost their most recent case in the Danish high court, which ruled that although their rights were seriously violated in 1953, that they did not have the right to return to their former home. A contradictory ruling, which to me was obviously a political decision instead of one made based on law and human rights. It seems the only avenue for them to pursue now is an international court of human rights at the Hague. I wonder if that will happen? Well, I dunno. But I do want to make three points and then finish writing for the evening. First, Lynge does not mention the fact that many of the local people were already considering moving north in 1953. Second, the book implies that if the right to return is granted, then the people of Qaanaaq will move back. I can't imagine how that will happen. Qaanaaq is an established town, and although it is lacking many amenities, it does have a significant infrastructure. Building a new town at the foot of Dundas Mountain will take a LOT of money - where will that come from?? Third, my own personal guess is that irrespective of what happens between Greenland, Denmark, and the US, that Thule Air Base will not be closed for a very long time.

One last pic from the museum here: the gravestone of a Mynah Bird. Not just any Mynah Bird, but one with an extensive vocabulary that once called a much-disliked commander an "asshole". I saved this picture in a bit higher resolution so you can read the story above the gravestone...