ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to recent scholarship on the geophysical sciences in Greenland during the Cold War period. With a focus on Melville Bay and adjacent waters, it explores how north Greenland environments became objects of scientific enquiry, often inspired by American military interests in ensuring the safe and efficient movement of shipping, while at the same time also marking out the region as strategic and geopolitical spaces of surveillance and observation. From the 1950s onwards, north Greenlandic waters were vital sea lanes for vessels establishing and supplying the infrastructure and installations of meteorology, radar systems, and defense. However, ice often hindered maritime traffic and effort went into tracking and measuring ice and icebergs, probing ocean depths, and surveying, mapping and charting the possibilities for safe and efficient transit. Along with scientific activities that were associated largely with military or security operations, during the last couple of decades of the Cold War period, Melville Bay and areas further north (such as the North Water Polynya) were also sites of interest for oceanographic research to understand water flow, heat budgets, and ice formation, and for geological surveys of the seabed. Surveillance programs and research initiatives ensured Northwest Greenland was a busy region, yet the Indigenous inhabitants were not necessarily informed about such activities; nor were they consulted about their knowledge and understanding of the nature of ice and water, clouds, winds and weather patterns.
