Distance Early Warning Line
Dye-2 and 3 were among 58 Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar stations built by the United States of America (USA) between 1955 and 1960 across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Iceland at a cost of billions of dollars.
After extensive studies in late 1957, the US Air Force (USAF) selected sites for two radar stations on the ice cap in southern Greenland. The DYE stations were the eastern extension of the DEW Line. DYE-1 was on the West Coast at Holsteinsborg; DYE-4 on the East Coast at Kulusuk. Dye 2 (66°29'30"N 46°18'19"W, 2338 masl) was built approximately 100 miles east of Sondrestrom AB and 90 miles south of the Arctic Circle at an altitude of 7,600 feet. Dye 3 was located approximately 100 miles east of Dye 2 and slightly south at an elevation of 8,600 feet, contrary to USAF map above.
The new radar sites were found to receive from three to four feet of snow each year. The snow was formed into large drifts by winds constantly blowing as much as 100 mph. To overcome this, the Dye sites were elevated approximately 20 feet above the ice cap surface. Dye 3 was completed in 1960. Due to snow accretion, the station was "jacked up" again in the late 1970s, but by the 1990s needed further elevation.
Instead, Dye 3 was closed as a radar station in the years 1990/1991.
Read more about this topic: Dye 3
Famous quotes containing the words distance, early, warning and/or line:
“Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“There’s something like a line of gold thread running through a man’s words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself. It’s another thing, though, to hold up that cloth for inspection.”
—John Gregory Brown (20th century)