notes on Thule I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule – From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime, Out of Space – out of Time. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Dream-land’, 1884
Long before it hosted an American air base during the cold war, Thule was a myth. The Roman historian Polybus wrote (c. 140 BC), after the Greek explorer Pytheus (c. 330 BC), that in Thule there was “no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jellyfish in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together, so to speak.” Strabo (c.30 BC) echoed this by saying that Thule was not properly air, sea or land, “but a kind of substance concreted from all these elements, resembling a sea-lungs... which you can neither walk nor sail upon.” No one knows exactly what Strabo meant by “a sea-lungs”. Thule was considered ‘the limit of the lands’ (Seneca, 1st century AD) in the north-west – for this reason it was also referred to as ‘Utima Thule’, and identified with Greenland, Iceland and Norway by cartographers. Around the 7th or 8th century AD Thule’s name and reputation began to settle more permanently onto Iceland, as Norwegians moved there in ever-larger numbers. Adam of Bremen (c. 1070) noted the conflation of two, saying that Thule had been renamed Iceland, “from the ice which binds the ocean”. The ice, he reported, was “black and dry”. However by the 12th century, in Western Europe, Thule had began to detach from Iceland and become its own myth again. In the minds of some writers it fused with another island called Tile, modern day Bahrain. Iceland was by this time well-known, and it could not plausibly contain the many contrary qualities that had attached to Thule over the course of a thousand years. So Thule lost its geographical mooring, and medieval maps once again took to placing it variously around the north-western extremities of the known world. In 1910 the name of Thule was again imposed upon a real place. Danish Explorers Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen established, at Cape York in Greenland, the Thule Trading Station, so named because it was reckoned to be the most northerly trading station in the world. Rasmussen and Freuchen lived at this Thule for many years. The people who already occupied the area had lived there for roughly 800 years and called it Uummannaq. Nazi occult beliefs included the idea that Thule was the birthplace of the Ayran race. The triangular Wewelsberg Castle, on its north to south Axis, formed the tip of a ‘spear’ which pointed, Himmler believed, towards Thule and the origins of Nazi supremacy. Denmark acquired Greenland in the thirties. An agreement with Denmark during WWII gave the U.S. a foothold on the island, where they built a number of weather stations. After the war Denmark made attempts to reclaim these stations, but with the Danish entrance into NATO in 1949, these attempts ceased. The weather station at Thule, Cape York, was moved and formally expanded into a full size air base in 1951 with the consent of the Danish government. The local population were forced to move to a newly built town 60 miles away. “Although the Inuits were not thrilled with leaving their home, it is said that the noise and smells from the planes and ships had frightened away many
of the polar bears, musk ox, seals, narwhals and fish that had previously called the area home and were essential to the Iniuits cultural survival.” (U.S.A.F. information pack ‘Welcome to Thule: “The top of the world”’) Construction of the base took two years and was an operation comparable in scale to the construction of the Panama canal. By the early sixties Thule Air Base had a population of 10,000, hosted various anti-missile and radar facilities, and provided a stepping stone for overflight missions into Soviet airspace. It was also one of many points along the ‘Chrome Dome’ mission route, which from 1960 to 1968 saw B-52 Stratofortress aircraft armed with thermonuclear weapons patrolling the Soviet border 24hrs a day, in shifts. Since 1950 there have been 32 known accidents involving nuclear weapons. Over the eight years it ran, Operation Chrome Dome was responsible for five of these accidents. The fifth occurred on the 21st of January, 1968, when a B-52 attempted an emergency landing at Thule Air Base after reporting a fire on board. The fire forced all six of the crew to bail out over Greenland, one dying in the process. The unmanned B-52 flew beyond Thule into Baffin Bay, breaking up in flames before hitting the thick sea ice. The conventional explosives it carried detonated and dispersed radioactive material from the nuclear warheads over a wide area. Today Thule Air Base is still operated by the U.S., performing missile warning and space surveillance duties, with roughly 600 personnel on site.