Wikimapia is a multilingual open-content collaborative map, where anyone can create place tags and share their knowledge.

Former DYE-3 Ice Cap DEW Line Radar Site

Greenland / Narsaq / Narsarsuaq /
 abandoned / shut down, Cold War 1947-1991, closed / former military
 Upload a photo

Call Sign: Sob Story

Constructed atop the Greenland Ice Cap at an altitude of 8,600ft above sea level over a multi-year period, the DYE-3 station was a manned long-range radar site in the DYE Sector of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line operated by the US Air Force. Declared operational in 1961 and equipped with a single AN/FPS-30 radar, the site and the near-mirror DYE-2 site built roughly 100 miles to the Northwest provided airspace coverage over the featureless expanse of the Greenland against Soviet air attack. Linked by tropospheric communications to DYE-2 to the Northwest and DYE-4 194 miles to the East, the site operated on a 24/7/365 basis and was manned year-round by 15 crew who were housed in a central "Composite" building which housed the majority of the stations radar, communication, power generation and life support systems.

The site's extremely isolated location meant that resupply could only be done by air, and only when weather conditions permitted crews a chance to compact an approximately 6,000ft by 220ft snow runway located alongside the station. As this was often impossible during the Winter, the majority of resupply and repair flights to the station took place primarily during the Summer, carried out almost exclusively by ski-equipped C-130D & H Hercules of the 109th Airlift Wing, New York Air National Guard, which were forward deployed to the Søndre Strømfjord airfield.

Remaining operational for nearly 30 years, the site was shut down with minimal notice at the end of the Summer of 1988. As a result, the facility was left in an essentially in-use condition when closed and has since been largely abandoned as-is. With the US lease on the 2,583 acres comprising the station site from the Danish Government expiring in the late 1990's, the station is now officially the property of the Kingdom of Denmark. To date there are no plans to demolish the station or conduct environmental remediation efforts on the site, which is slowly being swallowed up by the surrounding snow drifts.

lswilson.dewlineadventures.com/dye3pics.htm
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   65°10'57"N   43°49'8"W
This article was last modified 7 years ago