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:
“The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“An overturned cart is a warning to oncoming drivers.”
—Chinese proverb.
“A line in long array, where they wind betwixt green islands;
They take a serpentine course—their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical clank;”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)