House and Helicopter

During the early years of the cold war, the US government was very concerned about a possible air attack from the Soviet Union via northern Canada. The US Air Force conceived three defence lines, one of them being a continuous radar fence stretching from western Alaska, across the top of North America, to the east coast of Greenland. They called it the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line. 31 remote radar stations were built on a 3600-mile distance. Operated twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, they reported to the North American Air Defence Center any incoming aircraft or missile.

The four stations in Greenland were built in 1959 – two of them  erected on top of the Ice Cap. They were, by far, the most impressive and complex stations of the whole network: 180 feet high, 5 million pounds built  on a mass of snow and ice nearly 10000 feet thick. Prior to this, nobody had ever built a permanent structure on the ice sheet...