East Greenland 1962 -- innocent research meets political intrigue

This might seem a strange post for this particular blog site, but I thought it worth pointing out that when research is going on, politics is never very far away......... not to mention active warfare!!

When my Greenland novel called "Icefall Zero" was published in 2014, I thought that some of the events portrayed might be considered ludicrous. But I had a gut feeling that something dodgy was going on, and that the USA had very serious territorial aspirations during the 1960s.

This is what I said on my web-site:

The novel is labelled as a thriller (it has to be labelled as something, according to the rules of the game). But I hope readers will see in it my deeper purpose! This is really an author's protest against environmental degradation, triggered by the events of the Cold War. A quiet wilderness deserving of reverence is violated and even desecrated by the great powers in the name of "national security" -- while the indigenous people, who have an almost mystical communion with the land, are not even consulted. The focus is East Greenland -- but it could just as well have been any wilderness in a position of strategic or economic importance.......

Wagner's Ring Cycle is an allegory about the self-destructive evil that flows from the lust for power and wealth. For the obsession with power, look no further than NATO and the Warsaw Pact alliance in the Cold War of the early 1960's. For the dream of limitless wealth, look no further than the international mining corporations who never turn away from a mineral resource which is capable of exploitation and capable of ensuring a long-term revenue stream. And when the "desirable" territory is a small country with a weak government, everything falls nicely into place. So the wilderness is desecrated -- unless somebody is brave enough -- or crazy enough -- to stand in the way.

In the novel, the villain of the piece is called Wagner, not Trump, who operates with the full weight of the US government behind him, and he controls his fiefdom from a mountain retreat called Himmelbjerg -- in Norse mythology the tallest mountain in the world of the Gods.

This is Malmbjerget, in the Werner Mountains of East Greenland.  There is a molybdenum mine here, sometimes worked and sometimes not, depending on global metal prices.  Nice metal resources, but devilishly difficult in terms of access.  All crushed ore has to be carried out on caterpillar tractor trains across the mountains to the coast -- up one glacier and down another.  In the novel this is called "Himmelbjerg" -- a very suitable place for the Twilight of the Gods.

Now here's a funny thing. When I was digging around for information which I needed to give the novel authenticity, I came across a declassified US document called "Technical Report EP-140. Environment of Southeast Greenland" and published originally by the Quartermaster Research and Engineering Center, Environmental Protection Research Division" in October 1961. Unclassified Catalog number AD 251 797. It is incredibly detailed. Although many pages are virtually illegible in the digitised version, there is enough detail visible to show that the East Greenland coast, adjacent to Denmark Strait, was being taken very seriously by the US military, and that they wanted to know EVERYTHING about it, including weather and climate, tides, sea ice conditions, landing beaches, anchorages, routes onto the ice sheet, vegetation, marine life etc etc. The discovery of the document was almost spooky..........

And here's another funny thing. While I was in the field as joint leader of an Oxford University expedition in 1962 there were two other scientists working in the area -- well-funded, with helicopter support. We never did work out whether they were doing serious research -- but we got to know that they were working under the auspices of the US Army.