https://archive.is/q5zMiSet in the brutally beautiful landscape of East Greenland, amidst jagged, snow-covered mountains and glacial blue fjords, is the ultimate environmental dystopia: the eerie, abandoned remnants of the famed World War II army base, Bluie East Two.
I visited the site in June during an arctic expedition with a Vintage Air Rally, led by Sam Rutherford, a former British army officer and military history buff. I was in the only plane that has landed at the site in more than twenty years—a 1952 Beech 19 aircraft owned by balloonists, Phil and Allie Dunnington—and what I found was deeply disturbing.
Just over an embankment above the runway, adjacent to a seemingly pristine fjord, are fields full of hundreds of thousands of rusting fuel barrels. The ground is spongy and you have to try and identify premade tracks in order to not fall into boggy holes or pierce your shoe with 70-year-old metal bits hidden in the deep, soft vegetation.
Streams in the valley around the heart of Bluie East Two run red with carcinogenic rivulets of rust and fuel deposits while the ground is strewn with industrial garbage. At the actual base, sinking into the earth are wrecked skeletons of air hangars, apartment blocks, and heavy machinery. Truck carcasses—stripped of anything useful over the years by local Inuits and the odd tourist—litter the ground at odd angles, as if the drivers got word of an imminent evacuation and, in a hurry to get home, literally turned the engine off and ran to catch the last plane back to America.