Thule Air Base is the United States Department of Defense’s northernmost installation located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, 947 miles south of the North Pole on the northwest side of the island of Greenland, and is approximately 550 miles east of the North Magnetic Pole.
Located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, Greenland is the world’s largest island. The term Greenland is “Kalaallit Nunaat" in the Inuit language. It is a country within the Kingdom of Denmark and inhabited by approximately 56,000 people.
Thule, pronounced tool- lee, is from the Latin word with the same spelling meaning “northernmost part of the habitable world.” Greenland covers nearly 840,000 square miles; more than 80 percent is covered either by the ice cap or smaller glaciers.
Thule is a land of contrasts. The perimeter of Greenland consists mainly of mountains. Glaciers flow down these mountains through deep valleys to the sea. The highest peaks, the Gunnbjom Mountains, on the eastern coast of the island rise over 12,000 feet.
Thule AB is located in a coastal valley approximately four miles from the entrance of North Star Bay on Greenland’s west coast. The bay is part of Baffin Bay, which extends to the southern part of Ellesmere Island 140 miles west of Thule. The base is built on a broad and rather flat glacial valley floor between two bedrock ridges, North and South Mountains. The valley slopes gently to the east-southeast until it meets an ice cap, the Great Land Glacier, about 10 miles inland.
Thule AB is locked in by ice nine months out of the year. Each summer an icebreaker ship pushes through the ice in North Star Bay to clear a path for American, Canadian and Danish cargo ships. This marks the opening of a very short “port season,” during which these ships bring in the installation’s annual bulk resupply of fuel, food, cargo and construction material. The bay will freeze again by mid- October, isolating access to the installation to either dogsled, or aircraft. The Thule AB airfield is open and operated year round.
Thule AB exists today due to agreements between the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, specifically addressing mutual defense. Strategically, Thule AB’s “Top of the World” vantage point enables Space Superiority. Thule AB supports Missile Warning, Missile Defense and Space Surveillance missions from the solid-state phased-array radar operated by the 12th Space Warning Squadron (12 SWS) and Satellite Command and Control through the Thule Tracking Station operated by the 23rd Space Operations Squadron, Detachment 1 (Det-1).
The base population expands to approximately 675 personnel in the summer and as few as 350 personnel in the winter months (with exercises, expeditions, contractors, and visitors), consisting of Danish, Greenlandic, Canadian, and American military and civilians.
Current as of 1 May 2021
Click here for photos of Thule AB.