At a windswept gravel airstrip in eastern Greenland, a small Danish military detachment has quietly kept watch for decades.<\/p>\n
Now, under a new U.S. defense agreement signed this week, the outpost at Mestersvig could soon become a key American military foothold in the Arctic.<\/p>\n
Mestersvig sits 149 miles from the nearest settlement (population 330), at the edge of an uninhabited national park larger than Germany and France combined. The place is covered in darkness during winter, with average temperatures of around 14 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is as remote, as cold, and as extreme as you can find in the world. You have to go to Antarctica to find similar conditions,\u201d said Anders Ibsen, a former officer with Denmark\u2019s Sirius dog sled patrol, an elite unit that uses Mestersvig to resupply.<\/p>\n
STRATEGIC CHOKEPOINT<\/p>\n
It oversees the stretch of ocean between Greenland, Iceland and Britain \u2014 known as the GIUK gap \u2014 that Russia\u2019s Northern Fleet must cross to reach the Atlantic. For NATO, controlling this chokepoint is critical to containing Russian naval power.<\/p>\n
Local member of parliament Justus Hansen welcomed the expansion, saying, \u201cIn east Greenland, we really need that new money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under the defense agreement, Washington will be allowed to establish a new base at Mestersvig and Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland, potentially marking the first U.S. military expansion on the vast, semi-autonomous Arctic island in decades.<\/p>\n
Currently, only three soldiers maintain the facility, which was built in the 1960s and includes barracks to house 150 soldiers.<\/p>\n
The U.S. has made no public announcement about its plans for the base.<\/p>\n
A HISTORY OF OUTSIDE INTEREST<\/p>\n
During World War II, this stretch of the Arctic island\u2019s coast became a front line in the \u201cweather war,\u201d a race between Germany and the Allies to read Greenland\u2019s weather, which shaped conditions over the North Atlantic and Europe days later.<\/p>\n
Germany secretly built manned stations here, but Danish dog sled patrols tracked them down, and Allied forces drove them out.<\/p>\n
Nearby, an EU-backed project aims to mine molybdenum \u2014 a critical metal for aerospace and defence \u2014 some 12 miles away. A Texas oil company plans to drill for oil this winter at an untested basin just south of Mestersvig, although it still lacks a permit to do so.<\/p>\n
The previous owner, ARCO, spent heavily on seismic work in the 1970s but never drilled.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny infrastructural improvements in Greenland would be very welcome,\u201d said Robert Price, CEO of Greenland Energy, the oil company.<\/p>\n
The 1.1-mile airstrip \u2014 long enough for military transport planes to land \u2014 can collect up to 5 meters of snow a year. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it\u2019s snowing, you\u2019re basically removing snow 24\/7,\u201d said Ibsen, the former dog sled patrol officer who spent a year at Mestersvig.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have plenty to do just staying alive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a windswept gravel airstrip in eastern Greenland, a small Danish military detachment has quietly kept watch for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":783791,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[39591,22371,2424,39589,22372,39590,2425,2420,1397,6232,258284,151,258283,2987,90,56,54,55,741],"class_list":["post-783790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-circulated-air-force-times","tag-circulated-army-times","tag-circulated-defense-news","tag-circulated-marine-corps-times","tag-circulated-military-times","tag-circulated-navy-times","tag-defense-news","tag-dn-dnr","tag-environment","tag-greenland","tag-mestersvig","tag-military","tag-military-news","tag-oil","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}