At a windswept gravel airstrip in eastern Greenland, a small Danish military detachment has quietly kept watch for decades. Now, under a new United States defense agreement signed in September 2026, the outpost at Mestersvig soon could become a key U.S. military foothold in the Arctic.
Mestersvig sits 240 kilometers from the nearest settlement (population 330), at the edge of an uninhabited national park larger than Germany and France combined. The place is covered in darkness during winter, with average temperatures of around minus 10 degrees Celsius.
“This is as remote, as cold and as extreme as you can find in the world. You have to go to Antarctica to find similar conditions,” said Anders Ibsen, a former officer with Denmark’s Sirius dog sled patrol, an elite unit that uses Mestersvig to resupply.
Strategic choke point
It oversees the stretch of ocean between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom — known as the GIUK gap — that Russia’s Northern Fleet must cross to reach the Atlantic. For NATO, controlling this choke point is critical to containing Russian naval power. A local member of parliament, Justus Hansen, welcomed the expansion, saying: “In east Greenland, we really need that new money.”
Under the defense agreement, Washington will be allowed to establish new bases at Mestersvig and Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland. It potentially marks the first U.S. military expansion on the vast, semiautonomous Arctic island in decades.
Currently, only three Soldiers maintain the Mestersvig facility, which was built in the 1960s and includes barracks to house 150 Soldiers. The U.S. has made no public announcement about its plans for the base.
A history of outside interest
During World War II, this stretch of the Arctic island’s coast became a front line in the “weather war,” a race between Germany and the allies to read Greenland’s weather, which shaped conditions over the North Atlantic and Europe days later. Germany secretly built manned stations here, but Danish dog sled patrols tracked them down, and allied forces drove them out.
A European Union-backed project aims to mine molybdenum — a critical metal for aerospace and defense — some 20 kilometers away. A Denver, Colorado-based oil company plans to drill for oil this winter at an untested basin just south of Mestersvig, although it still lacks a permit to do so.
The previous owner, ARCO, spent heavily on seismic work in the 1970s but never drilled. “Any infrastructural improvements in Greenland would be very welcome,” said Robert Price, CEO of Greenland Energy, the oil company.
The 1.8-kilometer airstrip — long enough for military transport planes to land — can collect up to 5 meters of snow a year. “When it’s snowing, you’re basically removing snow 24/7,” said Ibsen, the former dog sled patrol officer who spent a year at Mestersvig. “You have plenty to do just staying alive.”