Qaanaaq's IS18 Infrasound Station: Listening to explosions from Greenland

The town of Qaanaaq, in northern Greenland, is surely one of the coldest, most desolate, and inhospitable places in the world.

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Its origin is related to the construction of the US air base at Thule, located 97 kilometers to the south. When it was built in 1953, the original inhabitants of the towns of Thule, Pituffik and Dundas, located near the base, were relocated to a new town, which was named Qaanaaq, which is one of the northernmost towns in the world, and also the northernmost of all those that have a palindrome as a toponym (that is, that can be read the same forwards or backwards).

Located north of the Arctic Circle, Qaanaaq experiences four months of darkness for its 646 inhabitants. The highest average temperatures occur in June at only 20°C, while the lowest average temperatures are recorded in February at -58°C. Communication is primarily by air, as land routes are limited to unpaved tracks. Interestingly, Qaanaaq has more Husky dogs than human inhabitants, as these animals are essential for traversing its snowy landscapes by sled.

In 2000, this desolate place was chosen by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) to install the IS18 Infrasound Station, the northernmost station of the International Monitoring System (IMS), covering an area of ​​several thousand kilometers in radius. From that desolate location, the IS18 microbarometers are operating 24 hours a day to monitor the Earth for evidence of explosions, primarily in the atmosphere, and transmit data to the International Data Centre (IDC) in Vienna, the CTBTO points out.

This facility is managed by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI). Qaanaaq was chosen for this station for several reasons: "the village is still inhabited; there is good infrastructure with commercial power available; and wind speeds are comparatively lower than in other locations."

The IS18 features an eight-element infrasonic array divided into two sub-arrays equipped with wind noise reduction systems and a central processing facility (CPF). Both IS18 and the village of Qaanaaq are located near the coast. Denmark also operates another IMS station, the AS27 auxiliary seismic station, at Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland, about 1,500 km south of IS18.

Currently, this facility operates 24/7, 365 days a year to detect nuclear explosions that violate the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The organization responsible for monitoring compliance has a total of 60 infrasound stations distributed worldwide, in addition to 170 seismological stations (50 main and 120 auxiliary), 11 hydrophone stations, and 80 stations designed to detect radioactive particles. You can watch a CTBTO video about IS18 here:

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Photos: CTBTO / Alchetron.