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Looking southwest
over the base
from
North Mountain
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The headquarters building
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Overlooking Baffin
Bay
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A typical street--no paving, just
packed and frozen dirt and rocks
By early October, all the bare
dirt will be covered for the winter
with a new layer of snow.
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Dining hall, dorms, and steam
distribution lines.
None of the utility lines are buried because the ground is permanently
frozen
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Dormitory entrance.
The buildings are raised above ground to keep their heat from melting
the permafrost, which would cause it to settle and sink.
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Mount Dundas
and North Star Bay
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Thawing ice
on Wolstenholme fjord
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Looking north across the fjord
at one of the three glaciers
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Danish
"Elephant Beer"
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Springtime
stream
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The
edge of the permanent ice cap
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Spring wildflowers on North Mountain
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An arctic hare
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Wildflowers at the base
of South Mountain
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At
Cape Atholl, an abandoned
site south of
the main base
Photo
by Ed "CJ" Brimner...thanks,
Ed.
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An
International TD-18 crawler,
in the Cape
Atholl landfill
Photo
by Ed "CJ" Brimner...thanks
again.
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A
few of the arctic foxes
that live on
the base
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North
Star Bay freezing
over in
October 1999
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Heavy
snow-removal equipment
tackling snow
on the flightline
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Small
icebergs trapped by
freezing
water in the bay
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Late
October sun, barely above
the
horizon even at midday,
lights up
Saunders Island
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One
of the weekly jets
delivering
passengers to the
base operations
terminal
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After
melting all summer,
this
iceberg still towers like
a
cathedral above the water
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The
radar site overlooking
Wolstenholme
Fjord
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Looking
across the fjord
towards
two of the three
glaciers
that converge here
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Looking
west across the fjord.
The
icebergs, barely visible in
this
photo, are the size of houses.
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| Looking
west over the base,
through the valley between South Mountain on the left and North
Mountain
on the right. The runway is visible just left of the center
of the
photo, looking like it points directly at that small hill in the
foreground.
Distances are great and deceiving up here--there are perhaps three
miles
between that hill and the end of the runway. |
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The
road directly outside my
dormitory, during a lull in a storm. The storms are
part of the
excitement of life at Thule, as high-velocity winds pick up particles
of
snow and ice from the permanent icecap and whip them across the
base.
When windspeed goes up and temperature and visibility go down, there's
nothing for it but to wait out the storm. |
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