The post World War II appearance of aircraft in the Arctic marked a turning point in Arctic geological exploration. Conventional means of travel – ship, boat, canoe or dog sledge - continued to be used for many years, but the availability of air support soon resulted in major changes in style and pace of Arctic field work. But the dawn of modern geological reconnaissance in Greenland was also marked by strong American geopolitical and military interests, as well as by rivalry within the Danish scientific community.
During this period, Greenland geology was generally explored in three largely independent institutional contexts, each covering their region of the island. To the north, investigations were conducted under the auspices of the US military. Helicopter-supported parties, working from the Thule Air Base or from icebreakers entered the scene in the late 1940s and 1950s. In this period the U.S. Geological Survey investigated large areas of northern Greenland as part of U.S. military projects such as “Operation Ice Cap” (1953-54), “Operation Defrost” (1956) and “Operation Groundhog” (1957-60) (Dawes & Christie 1991, 2002; Dawes & Weidick 1999).
Although in some cases Danish geologists did participate in these military operations, Danish efforts were mainly concentrated on the Eastern and Western parts of the island. Remarkably however, these investigations were carried out in two different and largely independent contexts. In the decades between the 1st and 2nd World Wars the Danish geologist Lauge Koch lead a number of highly successful topographical and geological surveys of North and East Greenland. In the process, Koch managed to establish and maintain a wide range of cooperative connections to scientists throughout the world from Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and Germany, to England, France and the USA. But at the same time, Koch’s lack of consideration for his Danish colleagues lead to seriously strained relations within the Danish geo-scientific community (Ries 2003, 2007).
After WW2, Danish geological exploration of Greenland had to be re-established in a vastly different political context – nationally as well as internationally. In 1946, Koch’s Danish colleagues regrouped to form GGU, to begin geological exploration of West Greenland without interference from Koch (Ellitsgaard-Rasmussen 1996). While GGU established new connections with Norwegian and American geologists especially, Koch’s international network had been shattered by the war: colleagues and collections had been lost and former geological allies turned against each other by wartime tragedies or divided by the Iron Curtain. In spite of this, Koch still managed to re-establish his East Greenland investigations as an independent consultant of the Danish Greenland Administration without cooperation from the Danish geologists. Until Koch’s retirement in 1958, two independent state-subsidised geological surveys operated in Greenland with little or no cooperation – GGU on to the West and Koch to the East (Henriksen 2002).
This sub-project aims specifically at exploring the interplay of technological, scientific and political developments that framed and shaped the geological investigation of Greenland during the Cold War, by asking the following questions: What were the political arrangements that made the tri-partition of Greenland’s geological investigation possible? What were the different scientific agendas behind the US’s, GGU’s and Koch’s operations? In which ways did geopolitical and military interests influence these operations? Which field technologies characterized these operations? To what extent did the professional and personal relations between the geologists mirror the institutional tri-partition of fieldwork operations? And to what extent were the activities of the different operations coordinated or in competition?
