Abstract
71° 8’ North, 40° 3’ West: Eismitte, literally middle ice, the geometric center of Greenland’s ice sheet. “When we leave our tent and turn towards the east, it is 500 kilometers of uniform ice desert separating us from the Greenland Sea. When we turn towards the west, it is 500 identical kilometers to the Baffin Sea from which we came. Towards the south? 1,200 kilometers, similarly uniform. Towards the north? 1,200 kilometers, without an undulation. [It is] the edge of the world, the end of the world. But not even, because this is not the world that man knows…”1 Remote and inhospitable as it is, Eismitte represents one of the scientifically richest locations in Greenland, and indeed in the Arctic world. This book traces the scientific history of Eismitte. It begins with the first efforts to penetrate into Greenland’s interior in the eighteenth century and ends with the postwar race to map the world fueled by the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. In between, it examines the first overwinter at the center of the ice sheet, spearheaded by famed German polar researcher Alfred Wegener in 1930–1931, the Expéditions Polaires Françaises (EPF) (French Polar Expeditions) expedition of 1948–1953, the United States military 1955 Project Jello trek, and the cooperative European Expédition Glaciologique Internationale au Groënland (EGIG) (International Glaciological Expedition to Greenland) expedition of 1956–1960.
Paul-Emile Victor et al., Groënland: 1948–1949 (Paris: Arthaud, 1951), 28. Except where indicated, all translations have been done by the author.
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Notes
Michael Spender and Therkel Mathiassen, “Alfred Wegener’s Greenland Expeditions 1929 and 1930–31: Review,” The Geographical Journal 84 (1934): 515.
James R. Ryan and Simon Naylor, “Exploration and the 20th Century,” in New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the 20th Century, ed. Simon Naylor and James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 11
Roger D. Launius, “Toward the Poles: A Historiography of Scientific Exploration During the International Polar Years and the International Geophysical Year,” in Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years, ed. James R. Fleming and Roger D. Launius (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 53.
Felix Driver, “Modern Explorers,” in New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the 20th Century, ed. Simon Naylor and James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 245.
See, for example, Mark Carey, “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species,” Environmental History 12 (2007)
Eric G. Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Barry H.
Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1986)
Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
Trevor H. Levere, Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration, 1818–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 425.
Much of this work centered on mapping, that is, delineating land-sea boundaries and identifying islands and other geographic features. See Urban Wråkberg, “The Politics of Naming: Contested Observations and the Shaping of Geographical Knowledge,” in Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices, ed. Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2002).
Fridtjof Nansen, Nord i Tâkeheimen. Utforskningen av Jordens Nordlige Strøk i Tidligere Tider (Oslo: Kristiania, 1911).
Particularly interesting works in these domains include Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, “Introduction: Science in the Field,” Osiris 11 (1996)
Jeremy Vetter, ed., Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010)
Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen and Christopher Jacob Ries, eds., Scientists and Scholars in the Field: Studies in the History of Fieldwork and Expeditions (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012)
Stuart McCook, “‘It May Be Truth, But It Is Not Evidence’: Paul De Chaillu and the Legitimation of Evidence in the Field Sciences,” Osiris 11 (1996).
The leading work here is David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Also see Richard C. Powell, “Geographies of Science: Histories, Localities, Practices, Futures,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007)
Simon Naylor, “The Field, the Museum and the Lecture Hall: The Spaces of Natural History in Victorian Cornwall,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (2002).
Ronald E. Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33 (2003).
Raf de Bont, “Between the Laboratory and the Deep Blue Sea: Space Issues in the Marine Stations of Naples and Wimereux,” Social Studies of Science 39 (2009): 199.
Also see Dag Avango’s work on industrial and resource heritage sites: for example, Louwrens Hacquebord and Dag Avango, “Settlements in an Arctic Resource Frontier Region,” Arctic Anthropology 46 (2009).
Richard Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Jonathan Jones, “Greenland’s Ice Sheet Melt: A Sensational Picture of a Blunt Fact,” The Guardian, Friday, July 27, 2012.
For the defense of Greenland during World War II, see William H. Hobbs, “The Defense of Greenland,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 31, no. 2 (1941)
Hans W. Weigert, “Iceland, Greenland and the United States,” Foreign Affairs 23, no. 1 (1944)
Nancy Fogelson, “Greenland: Strategic Base on a Northern Defense Line,” Journal of Military History 53, no. 1 (1989)
Finn Løkkegaard, Det Danske Gesandtskab in Washington 1940–1942 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968).
For sovereignty concerns in the postwar era, see Eric S. Einhorn, National Security and Domestic Politics in Post-War Denmark: Some Principal Issues, 1945–1961 (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1975)
Eric S. Einhorn, “The Reluctant Ally: Danish Security Policy 1945–49,” Journal of Contemporary History 10, no. 3 (1975)
Poul Villaume and Thorsten Borring Olesen, I Blokopdelingens Tegn, 1945–1972 (Copenhagen: Gyldendaal, 2005)
Shelagh D. Grant, Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010).
Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics- Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
Ryan and Naylor, “Exploration and the 20th Century,” 11. For classic examples of classification in the context of exploration, see Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Friendly Arctic: The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions (New York: Macmillan Co., 1921)
Laurence P. Kirwan, A History of Polar Exploration (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1960).
Stephen Bocking, “A Disciplined Geography: Aviation, Science and the Cold War in Northern Canada,” Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 273.
Peder Roberts, The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3.
Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (London: Belhaven, 1993), 2.
On this, also see Elizabeth Baigent, “‘Deeds Not Words’? Life Writing and Early 20th Century British Polar Exploration,” in New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the 20th Century, ed. Simon Naylor and James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).
Michael F. Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
The quote is from Robert Marc Friedman, “Review of Michael F. Robinson’s ‘The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture’,” Isis 99, no. 3 (2008): 641.
See, for example, Børge Fristrup, The Greenland Ice Cap , trans. David Stoner (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1966)
Louis Rey, Groënland: Univers de Cristal (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
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© 2013 Janet Martin-Nielsen
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Martin-Nielsen, J. (2013). Introduction. In: Eismitte in the Scientific Imagination. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375988_1
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