CLUI exhibits in greenland Thule airbase subject of frigid program
The front door of Thule is the airport terminal.
CLUI photo
A new CLUI exhibit, called Ultima Thule, was
shown at the Greenland National Museum and Archives, April 21-May
14, 2006, in Nuuk, the largest town in Greenland. The exhibit
was commissioned by NIFCA, the Nordic Institute for Contemporary
Art, and was part of a larger, multi site exhibiton held in Greenland,
Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Finland. Ultima Thule was later
shown at CLUI in Los Angeles.
Ultima Thule was about a remarkably isolated American outpost
at the top of the world, the largest northernmost community
on the planet, a remote electronic American eyeball, staring
out into space. Thule is at the terrestrial edge of communication,
perception and imagination.
The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System
(BMEWS) is a wall of radar established in the northern hemisphere
in 1961, now using three radar stations: at Clear, Alaska, Flyingdales
Air Field in the UK, and at Thule. Thule’s radar was converted
to its present form, a ten-story phased array type, built by
Raytheon, in 1987. It continues to stare north and east, able
to spot missiles and aircraft in Europe and Asia, and to track
minute space debris. Its data is transmitted directly to the
legendary bunker in Cheyenne Mountain, at Colorado Springs, Colorado.
CLUI photo
Ultima Thule showed the two primary electromagnetic
facilities at Thule, the radar station and the satellite control
station, critical links in America’s global surveillance and
control system. The sites were depicted through fixed video,
shot on site by the CLUI in March, 2006. The effect was to show
how the two facilities, ever vigilant, watch and radiate in their
frozen nests, continuously, operating on frequencies outside
the visible spectrum, out of sight of the world, yet straining
to see in the minutest way over great distances, and communicating
their vision, to a limited but all important audience, through
tremendous effort and bandwidth.
Thule is home to 1,100 people, all of whom live and work at
the base. This population includes 600 Danes working for Greenland
Contractors, the company that operates the base for the U.S.
military, as well as other civilian contractors, and 120 U.S.
military personnel, who run the base. Built in 1951 as a refueling
station for American bombers, the base exists today to support
two radar and telemetry stations, established in the early
1960’s, at separate locations a few miles from the main base,
and both expanded and metamorphosed by evolutions in technology.
The word “Thule” originally refers to an imaginary place on
the edge of civilization, the “northernmost habitable land.”
Ultima Thule was a place thought to be even beyond that, according
to the musings of the 4th century geographer Pytheas - the
northernmost place. Today, no longer simply mythological and
hypothetical, Thule is a physical area, the American outpost
on the northwestern corner of Greenland, 700 miles north of
the Arctic Circle.
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is part of Kingdom
of Denmark, but has had home rule status since 1979 (though
not in foreign affairs). 80% of Greenland is a continuous ice
sheet, up to 16,000 feet thick, sitting on top of the island.
The population is 56,000 nationwide, with nearly everyone living
on the thin strip between the land and the ice around the southern
edge.
Up north, the communities are mostly small, and widely separated,
Inuit, military, and scientific outposts. Qaanaak is the world’s
northernmost municipality, a community of around 600 Inuit
hunters. They used to live at Dundas, next to the present Thule
Airbase. When the base expanded in 1953, the native town was
evacuated by the Americans, and the residents were relocated
to a new community, Qaanaak, in a bay 60 miles north. Though
Qaanaak is sometimes referred to as Thule, Thule was the name
given to their original community by the explorer Knud Rasmussen,
who established a small trading post, mission, and base of
arctic exploration there. The American base adopted the name
officially in 1963.
The four domes of the satellite communications
facility known as “Detachment 3” are part of a global system
of control stations for the defense department’s fleet of over
130 satellites. Enveloping the world in a concentric infosphere,
intelligence, imagery, communications, and GPS system information
is uploaded and downloaded through this facility, which is linked
directly to the master control center at Schriever Air Force
Base, also in Colorado Springs.
CLUI photo
During WWII, the USA took over the defense of
Greenland from the Danish, as Denmark was occupied by the Germans,
and Greenland had a number of important weather stations on it
(the day of the D-Day landing, for example, was determined by
weather forecasts based on Greenlandic weather information).
After the war, the Americans decided to build a base at Thule,
to be able to fly nuclear bombs into Russia (from Thule, Moscow
was within the range of U.S. bombers at that time). In 1951,
Operation Blue Jay commenced, in secret, to build the base. That
spring, an armada of 82 ships, loaded with prefabricated buildings,
equipment, and construction materials came up from Norfolk, Virginia.
10,000 people were involved in construction, which continued
nonstop for 104 days, until the harbor iced in. But by then,
much of the base was built, and the 287 square mile Thule Defense
Area was established, making this area of Greenland part of the
American sphere.
For the first decade of its existence, Thule continued to grow.
Its main function was as a gas station, to supply fuel to U.S.
Strategic Air Command aircraft. It had the military’s largest
fuel tank farm (100 million gallon capacity). It also had a fighter
interceptor squadron, and a ring of Nike missiles to protect
the base. At its peak, in 1961, the base was home for 10,000
people. With the improvement in aircraft range, aerial refueling
techniques, and the invention of intercontinental ballisitic
missiles, the base’s function officially changed from offense
to defense. The BMEWS radar array was built, a giant ear designed
by RCA, plugged into the NORAD bunker in Colorado, by an elaborate
network of communication relay points.
With the decrease in aircraft activity, the base population
shrank, though it still was – and is – an important airport for
military and scientific missions in the arctic. In 1968, it had
a population of 3,370, and loaded bombers were still flying around
the edges of the Soviet Union 24/7. That year, a B-52, based
out of Plattsburg New York, crashed into Thule’s frozen bay with
four nuclear bombs on board. The clean up involved moving tons
of debris contaminated with radioactivity (much of which ended
up at the Nevada Test Site). One bomb is said to have never been
recovered from the ocean floor. This event, and a few other “Broken
Arrow” incidents, helped put an end to the continuous Airborne
Alert flights.
But it was the move of the battlefield to space, through the
use of ICBMs and satellites, that changed Thule to the way it
is now. Though Thule exists today primarily to support the satellite
control station and the space radar array, Thule’s 10,000 foot
runway is used as a base for arctic training, research, and scientific
programs, and hosts a total of 2,600 flights a year. Thule is
the supply base for even more remote facilities, like Alert,
650 miles away, a radio listening post operated by the Canadian
military that is the northernmost continuously occupied place
in the world.
Though remote, Thule is between all things,
and connected globally. All the phone numbers for Thule have
a Colorado Springs area code, even though the phone is ringing
in Northern Greenland.
CLUI photo
Nearly all the buildings in use at Thule were
built as part of the original base in the 1950s. These buildings
were made from Plymouth Panels and Clements Panels, prefabricated
insulated sections that bolted together, forming buildings that
function like walk in freezers in reverse (keeping the cold out).
The building’s are elevated above the ground to keep them from
melting the permafrost which is less than a foot thick. If the
ground melted, the buildings foundations would collapse. In many
cases buildings have pipes and vents forcing air to circulate
under them to dissipate the building’s heat.
The buildings are connected by steampipes,
and vented underneath, so that the heated buildings do not melt
the permafrost..
CLUI photo
The entire base, from the electrical plant to
the heat plants, runs on J-8 jet fuel. In the winter, total darkness
lasts for over 90 days, and the temperature sinks to -40 F. In
the winter, vehicles used to shuttle people from building to
building leave their engines running continuously. Aircraft bring
in supplies and people, with regular weekly and monthly flights
from Copenhagen and Baltimore. In the summer, the northernmost
deepwater port in the world, at Thule, is free of ice for a couple
of months, and supply ships come in. The 1,000 foot pier at the
port is made of sunken barges, and is locked in the ice the rest
of the time.
One of dozens of warming huts along the
roads, where heat stays on continuosly, in case travellers are
stranded in a storm.
CLUI photo
There are a few roads that extend beyond the base
to remote communication sites, in use and historic, and recreational
areas. The furthest is an old U.S. Coast Guard Loran station, 32
miles away. Beyond that, there are no roads connecting Thule to
other places, and these roads are open only in the summer. The
roads leading to regularly visited places, like BMEWS and Det 3,
and the dump, have storm shelters every mile or so, where the heater
(powered by Jet 8) is left on continuously, in case someone is
stranded by a sudden storm on their way to or from work. Inside
each shelter are two beds, some food, a shovel, a phone, and a
bible.
The CLUI exhibit Ultima Thule, co-sponsored by the Center’s Polar
Program, was part of the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art
(NIFCA)’s multi-site exhibition called “Rethinking Nordic Colonialism,”
which was organized by Kuratorisk Aktion, out of Berlin and Copenhagen.
NIFCA, a remarkable organization that supported creative projects
throughout the world’s arctic region, is now, unfortunately, defunct.
