Monitoring of the Rehabilitation of the Historic World War II US Air Force Base in Greenland

Abstract

After the end of World War II, many military air bases in Greenland were abandoned with all the material left in place. One of these sites was the Bluie East Two military air base. A specific feature of this area is that it contained thousands of old barrels formerly used for fuel storage. In 2019, a rehabilitation of this area began. A few months prior to the rehabilitation, our expedition visited the area and mapped it using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This made it probably the latest documentation before the start of the sanitation. The aim of such mapping was to estimate the number of barrels in a given location. The second objective was to monitor the progress of the rehabilitation over the years. For this purpose, satellite data were acquired for the years 2019 through 2022. A supervised classification was performed to automatically detect sites with barrel occurrences, which enabled subsequent change detection. We conclude that a total of 33,786 old barrels were located in the investigated area in 2019. However, we suggest this number is a lower estimate of the actual number of barrels due to the factors we mention in our paper. The results further indicate that between the years 2019 and 2022 the barrels were removed from more than half of the area.