US defence agreement could bring new base to remote Greenland outpost

Mestersvig, Greenland. A Danish military outpost on a gravel airstrip in eastern Greenland could become a US military foothold in the Arctic under a defence agreement signed this week. Washington is allowed to establish bases at Mestersvig and at Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland.

A remote outpost

A small Danish military detachment has kept watch at Mestersvig for decades. Three soldiers currently maintain the facility, which was built in the 1960s and has barracks for 150 soldiers.

Mestersvig is 240 kilometres (149 miles) from the nearest settlement, which has a population of 330. It stands beside an uninhabited national park larger than Germany and France combined. The area is dark during winter, when average temperatures are around minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit).

“This 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,” said Anders Ibsen, a former officer with Denmark’s elite Sirius dog sled patrol, which uses Mestersvig to resupply.

Arctic strategy

The outpost overlooks the stretch of ocean between Greenland, Iceland and Britain known as the GIUK gap. Russia’s Northern Fleet must cross it to reach the Atlantic, and NATO considers control of the chokepoint critical to containing Russian naval power.

Local member of parliament Justus Hansen welcomed the potential expansion. “In east Greenland, we really need that new money,” he said. The agreement could mark the first US military expansion on the vast, semi-autonomous Arctic island in decades, but the US has made no public announcement about its plans for the bases.

During World War Two, this stretch of Greenland’s coast was a front line in the “weather war”, a race between Germany and the Allies to gather weather information from Greenland that would help predict conditions over the North Atlantic and Europe days later.