The air traffic control tower — which is still in use — and the buildings behind it are featured in many vintage photos of the base. The yellow bars once held a sign welcoming visitors to Sondrestrom Air Base. On top of the building behind it was a sign with US military emblems and a landscape with a polar bear — although bears rarely venture this far south. I have overlaid portions of vintage photos of US soldiers greeting Prince Knud of Denmark (Danish Arctic Institute, 1965) and the original sign (US National Archives, 1984) over my 2021 photograph of the site.

These are the components of the layered photo on the previous page: Msgt. Glen D. Plummer, The Base Operations Building (1984, National Archives); US Air Force Personnel Greet Prince Knud of Denmark, June 1965 (1965, Danish Arctic Institute); Air Traffic Control Tower (2021). My photograph from 2021 without the overlays. The chain link fence topped with barbed wire that surrounds the runway was added sometime after the base closed in 1992.

Layered montage of photographs of the road east from the base toward the ice sheet, alongside the Akuliarsuup River looking toward the mountain called Sugarloaf. It combines (from top) with two photographs from the 1950s made by Danish scientists who used the base as a site from which to conduct research: a 1957 photograph by Børge Fristrup in early spring and a 1952 photograph of a serviceman with the US colonel's Chevrolet by Christian Vibe. At the bottom is featured my 2022 photograph at the height of midsummer when meltwater from the ice sheet rushes downstream.

The left photograph in the US National Archives shows a roller driver putting the finishing touches on the US air base runway in July 1947 as part of “Project Mailbag.” 75 years later, in July 2022, I was walking on the road alongside the same runway when a Greenlandic construction worker who had just finished work for the day drove a roller past and waved.

(Montage: 2024; Photos: 1980s and 2022) Photograph of what is now the Kangerlussuaq Hostel, overlaid with a vintage photo by Ole Simonsen from the Danish Arctic Institute of the building when it was the Caribou Club, a social and recreation facility for non-commissioned military officers.

A male caribou pauses on a flat rock in the hills outside town on a summer evening. Caribou are native to West Greenland and before the air base, indigenous people would travel by kayak and on foot from coastal settlements to hunt them here during the summer months. Hunting caribou is still an important part of the culture and food supply. Beside it is a montage made with a detail and full photo of a JATO rocket fuel bottle, used as a cigarette ashtray at a bus stop, where it is decorated with caribou antlers.

Empty JATO (jet-assisted take-off) rocket fuel bottles that once provided extra thrust for take-offs for ski-equipped planes from the ice sheet are now ubiquitous outside buildings as outdoor cigarette ashtrays, another example of repurposing discarded base relics that makes Kangerlussuaq unique.

A photograph of the Change of Command Ceremony on May 4, 1973 from the Danish Arctic Institute is overlaid onto a photograph I took in 2022 of the same room in the Kangerlussuaq Recreation Center, which then and now also served as a basketball court. The recreation center also has a well-maintained indoor pool, which for many years was the only one in the country.

The site of Greenland's first runway, originally prepared by a University of Michigan geology expedition in 1928 for the Rockford Flyers, a pair of American aviators who never landed there. (They ran out of fuel 110 miles south and managed to arrive on foot two weeks later, when they were spotted and rescued.) The weathered plywood markers weighted with rocks are a later addition, but mark the outline of the original runway.

Even though the EPA conducted a cleanup of the Sondrestrom Air Base after it closed in 1992 and removed at least 2,000 barrels, many remain, some in the junkyard, others strung with cables, painted bright colors and used as guardrails along the gravel roads outside town.

Standing on the ice sheet that covers 80% of Greenland in September after a few inches of snow had fallen and the ground froze. This photograph is on permanent display at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

Standing on the ice sheet that covers 80% of Greenland in summer when meltstreams form. Gravel blown onto the icy crust makes this image resemble a pencil drawing. This photograph is in a permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

This photo was taken from the top of the moraine at the end of the Volkswagen road, which stretches into the distance. My back was to the ice sheet and the view of the tourists in the next photo. In 2000, when the road was completed, Volkswagen’s convoys drove onto the ice sheet directly from where I was standing. The project was abandoned by 2005 as impractical due to unanticipated ice dynamics. This coincides with the onset of increased melting of the ice sheet due to climate change beginning in 2000. The Greenland Home Rule government maintains the road as an amenity for scientists and tourists. The road's end also provides a benchmark for the effects of climate change.

Buses ferry visitors to the ice sheet to witness its sublime beauty on the road built in 1999-2000 by Volkwagen Motors. In 2001 when the auto testing project was active, vehicles could drive directly onto the ice cap from the end of the road. Now visitors walk down the steep gravel hill formerly covered by the ice cap in the foreground of this photograph. As the ice sheet melts and its edge recedes inland, it also uncovers permafrost (a layer of soil that is frozen year round). This photograph is in a permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.
 

20 years before this photograph was taken, the ice cap that covers 80 percent of Greenland also covered the steep moraine on the left. The ice has since retreated inland. (A regional government official told me that the ice formerly covering the moraine has dropped 30 to 50 meters since then.) In July, a swiftly flowing stream filled by meltwater from the ice cap divided the ice cap edge from the moraine.

This sculpture measuring 17.25 x 15.25 x 1.75 inches was made from a 3D scan of a small section of the ice sheet for the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum. The dark blue represents the streams of water that had formed under the summer sun. To make the sculpture, first a series of photographs of the scene from different angles were processed into a 3D file using photogrammetry software. After editing the file with 3D modeling software, it was carved in high density urethane foam by CNC router, a machine that can read 3D files. Since the ice is constantly changing — and melting — this is a permanent record of a temporary form. One of the source photos from which this sculpture was made is also shown.

This area was covered by the Greenland ice cap 20 years ago. As the ice cap edge melts and recedes inland, it exposes the permafrost layer (frozen soil) to the sun, opening ice-walled cracks that grow deeper and more numerous each year once the soil is exposed to the sun. In midsummer, streams run through the cracks as the permafrost melts, another contributor to downstream impacts of climate change in Kangerlussuaq and ultimately, global sea level rise.

The Russell Glacier, named by the American geologist William Herbert Hobbs for a University of Michigan colleague in the late 1920s, is an outlet glacier from the Greenland ice sheet. Its front is located 25 km east of Kangerlussuaq and 7 km west of the end of the Volkswagen road where the previous photos were taken. Here my panoramic view is paired with a photograph below it taken by Danish glaciologist Børge Fristrup in 1955 (collection Danish Arctic Institute). The glacier has lowered in height and lost ice along the river noticeably since then. This pair of photographs is in the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

During the summer a torrent of meltwater from the ice sheet tumbles down a waterfall at the north end of the glacier carving out and collapsing the edge on its downstream journey to Kangerlussuaq Fjord. This spot is hidden by the hill on the left in the previous photo.

A local tour guide photographs a young Danish couple visiting Kangerlussuaq on holiday during a private tour to the ice sheet in mid September when it was freshly covered with snow. Tourism became the town’s main economic driver, facilitated by the frequent international flights, infrastructure left behind by the US Air Force, and the road to the ice sheet left by Volkswagen.

Photographs taken on my first visit to Kangerlussuaq (a one-day visit as part of a tour in 2018, top) and when I returned four years later (bottom) show the extent of the ice loss over that period, in terms of the overall elevation of the ice, the portion extending into the river, and the portion over the dark gravel hill on the right. "Reindeer Glacier" is the local nickname for this portion of the ice cap. These photographs are part of the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

A powerful waterfall churns with meltwater several miles downstream from the Greenland ice cap in midsummer. This photograph is in the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

In the 1970s, five concrete rockt launch pads for meteorological research were installed east of the base along the shore of the Akuliarusiarsuup Kuua river, as seen in a 1974 photo (by Jørgen Taagholt) in the collection of the Danish Arctic Institute (top left). Increased water flow from the melting ice sheet have heavily eroded the banks, leading to the collapse of all but one of the original platforms into the river. As of 2020, there were still two platforms on land, but on a visit to the site in 2022, only one remained (bottom left); the other was jutting from the river (right).

A panorama of the town from the top of Black Ridge (elev. 360 feet), a hill overlooking the confluence of the river from the ice cap and the fjord leading out to sea (located where the bridge is). Most of the buildings were originally built by the American military which also blasted two channels beneath where the bridge is now so the area around the shore wouldn't flood during the summer melt season. The sites shown in the next 6 photographs can all be seen from right to left in this panorama, following the direction of the river flow. This photograph is part of the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

A close-up of the wave-like patterns of silt on the rocks just around the bend from the town bridge where the river empties into the Kangerlussuaq Fjord. In the summer the rivers that run between the ice sheet and the Kangerlussuaq Fjord are fed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet flowing off the Russell Glacier mixed with fine glacial silt. As one scientist puts it, “By the time it gets to Kangerlussuaq and passes under the town’s bridge, it’s essentially a rock, soil, and sand smoothie.

Shortly before he was scheduled to return home from his deployment in August 1976, American serviceman Jack T. Perry and two friends embarked on a river rafting trip from the ice sheet in an inflatable boat. Suddenly they heard the roar of a waterfall ahead. His friends jumped out and swam to shore, but he remained in the boat, which was swept backwards over the edge. Search and rescue efforts failed to locate him. His body remained missing for 10 years, until two hotel workers noticed a combat boot sticking up out of the permafrost, seven kilometers downstream from the waterfall. A plaque was mounted on the bridge in his memory.

The American military blasted two channels beneath where the bridge is now so the area around the shore wouldn't flood during the summer melt season. It has also altered the ecology so that not only does more silt flows into the fjord, but a jetty was built a short distance downstream to redirect the powerful surge of water that was eroding the banks near the airport runway. This photograph is on a two-page spread in the book The New Geologic Epoch (ecoartspace, 2023).

Every summer, the soupy mix of melted ice and fine glacial silt from the Greenland ice sheet settles in the fjord after passing beneath the town bridge. Here, as autumn arrives, the water level decreases, revealing semi-frozen mud — and quicksand. This photograph is part of the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

In fall, after the water had receded, I could walk onto the rocks beneath the bridge. Here is a close-up of the wave-like patterns of semi-frozen silt on the rocks where Qinnguata Kuussua (also known as Watson River) empties into the Kangerlussuaq Fjord after passing through a channel in the rock blasted by the American military. The river is fed by melting of the Greenland ice cap flowing off the Russell Glacier, which, as shown in a previous photo, in the summer months is milky with fine glacial silt.

As the water flow receded in fall, I took this view from the bridge looking down on the eroded rocks below, where the river flowing from the Greenland ice cap some 20 miles away empties into the fjord. A piece of rebar is embedded in the rock, possibly from one of the earlier bridges this one replaced.

The iconic red and white signpost originally stood in front of the civilian hotel before being relocated to the airport. In 2014 it was renovated by Air Greenland, changing the flight times, adding cities, and removing the SAS company emblem from the top. Andreas “Suko” Lund-Drosvad (1899-1989), a Dane who lived in Upernavik, Greenland, and founded a museum there, posed with the sign in 1959. This pair of photographs is in the permanent installation I installed in the Kangerlussuaq Museum in 2023.

The former Offshore Transit Home of the Sondrestrom Air Base is one of many abandoned military buildings I photographed. This one is in the part of town known as Old Camp, where barracks for Danish troops and facilities for the entire base were located. Dozens of disconnected telephone poles like the ones here are found throughout the base. (They were shipped here by the US military from outside Greenland which has no native trees that grow more than a few feet high.) They are gradually being cut down and added to a huge pile in the town junkyard.

Part of my project involves rephotographing sites in old photos of the air base as they look today. My 2021 photograph of an abandoned building is shown here with a rephotographed 1954 mounted print from the US National Archives when it was The Dirty Shame Saloon.

Base leftovers give Kangerlussuaq its quirky appearance. Here, an old fuel tank and oil drums from the former American air base have been repurposed into a mockup of an airplane crash periodically set ablaze for firefighter training.

Hobbs first landed at this beach or the adjoining shoreline. The rocky slope is covered with graffiti dating back as far as 1954 including names of US military units — the first tip off to a visitor arriving by ship that this is not a typical Greenlandic town.

Among the military debris left behind is this decaying barge is anchored in the harbor, with half its port side hull gone. It is among the many massive relics of the air base that are too big to be moved and too expensive to haul away.

A building atop a hill near Hobbs’ former weather station contains three large diesel generators, their interiors still coated with inky grease. They once powered the USAF global communication station and a 450-meter mast said to be the tallest man-made structure in the world at the time, which communicated with planes throughout the North Atlantic after the mast was erected in 1953. The mast was dismantled in 1969, with parts of it moved to an island near Nuuk, Greenland, but its concrete supports remain on the hill.

Four US Air Force planes parked on the Kangerlussuaq Airport runway in 2022. Although Sondrestrom Air Base closed in 1992, a New York Air National Guard unit has maintained an outpost there to train polar pilots for Arctic and Antarctic missions. They also transport scientists and supplies to Summit Station, a year-round research facility operated by the US National Science Foundation in the center of the ice sheet, as well as to smaller temporary field camps during the summer research season.

“In choosing this fjord for...our Greenland weather station it has been necessary to assume a considerable risk, for no maps exist which tell us anything of the country once the fjord has been left behind.”

—University of Michigan geologist William Herbert Hobbs, on entering the fjord in 1927

Tundra plants turned red and gold in September cling to a smooth rock formation on Black Ridge. In the 1980s Americans and Danes on the air base referred to the black and white pattern lower right as “The Ayatollah” because they thought it resembled a bearded man with a white turban, like Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran. The name has stuck.

The thousands of musk oxen (Ovibos moschatus) roaming the hills surrounding Kangerlussuaq today are descended from just 27 calves brought here from East Greenland in the 1960s in an effort to perpetuate the species and establish them in West Greenland. This musk ox was with a herd grazing in the hills east of Lake Ferguson. It was a long day of hiking on spongy steep terrain until we quietly managed to creep around a small hill and hide behind a rock about 25 meters away. For a little over 15 minutes they tolerated our presence. This photograph is in the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

Today, the story of Willy the Muskox has endured long past the time where anyone still living there has firsthand memories of him. One of the original 27 calves released south of the fjord, he took to crossing the bridge and wandering the base, where he became a sort of mascot and acquired his nickname. However, as Willy matured, he periodically became aggressive — often incited by soldiers for their own amusement. Attempts to relocate him failed, for he always returned. One day, the base commander ordered him shot, elevating him to folk hero status.

An Arctic hare (Lepus arcticus) springs from the bushes in the section known as Old Camp, which housed Danish troops and civilian contractors. Its summer coat of gray fur will turn white as winter approaches. This photograph is in the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

Looking up at the intricate engineering of the Sondrestrom Incoherent Scatter Radar dish, built in 1971 for atmospheric research in Alaska, moved to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland in 1982, where it has stood unused since 2018. It was originally moved there because there was a hole in the ionosphere just above that area that makes it easier to gather information from space. In 2023, the surrounding buildings where science personnel lived and worked were torn down to make way for a University of New Brunswick research group that is planning to reactivate it. This photograph is in the permanent installation at the Kangerlussuaq Museum with a vintage 1984 photo of the radar dish complex, known locally as Kellyville after John Kelly, the scientist who initiated the project.

Scattered conifers and birch trees near the road outside of town are the survivors of an effort led by a Danish botanist to introduce trees native to other North American locations to sites in Greenland; this was largely unsuccessful in Kangerlussuaq. The trees’ slender trunks and relatively small size bely the fact that most are 40 to 50 years old (although a few may have produced cones that later took root). In 2023 someone had whimsically hung Christmas tree ornaments on one. Hidden in its branches is a tag from the study.

A pair of painted rocks on a hillside above the Kangerlussuaq Harbor served as aircraft beacons meant to be visible from the air to approaching planes. In the 1950s, the American servicemen referred to them by the crass term “the tits of Marilyn Monroe.”

The fine white hairy strands of cottongrass sprout besides streams and drainage ditches in the Arctic summer.

Tundra wildflowers that grow during the brief Arctic summer, which I photographed on my first 24-hour visit to Kangerlussuaq that inspired this project.

Small bronze sculptures by Heike Arndt, a German artist with a studio in Denmark, decorate the departure lunge. Kangerlussuaq's status as Greenland's international air hub became the engine of the local economy in 1992, although during 2025, Air Greenland moved its hub to a newly expanded airport in the capital, Nuuk, which has had a major impact on the community. About 30% of the citizens left, but those who remain have met the challenges with passion, pride and determination to find a way forward in a place they see as home.

After 1992, Kangerlussuaq transitioned from military installation to Greenland’s international civilian air hub, with regular flights to and from Copenhagen via Air Greenland and a steady stream of connecting flights to other Greenlandic airports throughout the day. The airport and businesses serving travelers dominated the economy until late 2024 when the hub was moved to Nuuk.

The Kangerlussuaq junkyard is an astonishing place, a semi-organized conglomeration of the discarded appliances and household items you’d see in any town dump alongside decades-old relics of the US military base  closed 30 years ago: obsolete vehicles and machinery; dozens of telephone poles, empty oil drums, and fuel tanks; and stacks of scrap metal.

Disconnected wood utility poles, wires cut, still line long stretches of road, remnants of the former base. Gradually they are being cut down and hauled to the junkyard, where they are piled like oversized Lincoln Logs jumped from a box. Greenland largely lacks waste disposal and recycling facilities, so most of the base infrastructure remains.

Before the American Air Base was established in 1941, Kangerlussuaq was an annual hunting ground for indigenous Greenlanders who lived on the coast some 80 to 120 miles away, but not a place with permanent structures that they identified as home. The establishment of the town cemetery in 2012 represented a shift. Surrounded by a white picket fence typical in Arctic villages in Greenland and Canada, as of 11 years later it had just nine graves decorated with artificial flowers, framed photos, lanterns, and other objects bordered by stones. The nearby dark circle was the former site of an air base fuel tank; beyond is an expanse of gravel and glacial silt dubbed "Dust City" during base days and still called that. Photographed from Black Ridge, a hill approximately 300 feet in elevation.

The graves are marked with white wooden crosses with metal plates bearing names of the deceased. Most are decorated with artificial flowers, framed photos, lanterns, and other objects, bordered by a low fence or stones.

Airmen called the broad sandy riverbank just west of town "Dust City." This vintage stone sorter and two other nearby pieces of equipment were used by the base — and still sometimes today — for sifting gravel for road repair.

Polar bears rarely venture as far south as Kangerlussuaq. In 1998, this bear was spotted a couple of miles from the settlement, considered dangerous, and shot. The taxidermied skin was mounted on the wall with photographs taken the day it was killed.

Residents’ sled dogs, a breed known as the Greenland dog, are not house pets, but are kept year-round in adjoining fenced outdoor yards on the outskirts of town, as is typical of Arctic villages. This pair were interacting playfully.

Muskoxen have become part of the local Inuit hunting culture Evald Minik Thybo works as a private tour guide. During the winter months of 24-hour darkness when tourism slows, he operates a small workshop to produce qiviut— the soft underwool beneath the longer outer wool of the muskox that is highly prized for its softness. A young man who worked for him explained to me that harvesting the wool is a laborious and strenuous process in which the hides are draped over large rubber-covered cylinders and combed with wire brushes. Evald sends the raw wool (center) to Germany to be spun into yarn (top), which he then takes to Nuuk, to sell.

Installation of the Canada Glacier from Lake Fryxell sculpture on view at the Juliet Art Museum, Clay Center, Charleston, West Virginia, in 2024 as part of Walking in Antarctica.

Panorama of Canada Glacier from Lake Fryxell, Antarctica (2015) photograph, 16.5 x 73 inches. The panorama gives some perspective on the size of the glacier. The area I photographed to make the 3D scan for the sculpture is on the left, centered in the area adjoining the lake.

Giant's Face" Pressure Ridge, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica (2017) acrylic, oil and wax on 3D-printed PLA plastic and polymer-modified gypsum, 19.5 x 36 x 15.5 inches, with one of the source photographs above it, 22 x 15.675 inches. Sculpture of a 20-foot-high Baroque looking sea ice pressure ridge in a remote section of New Harbor. The basic 3D scan was generated via photogrammetry, further edited, printed in sections and epoxied together. I added the icicles by hand and then painted it. This photo is from the installation of Walking in Antarctica at the Fairfield University Art Museum in 2024.

This alcove of the Fairfield University Art Museum's 2024 installation of Walking in Antarctica includes photographs and sculptures from the section of the exhibition titled "A Walk Over the Canada Glacier."