History of exploration in northeast Greenland

Solution caves in Greenland were first discovered in 1960 at Lat: +80° during Operation Groundhog – a programme to investigate emergency landing sites for aircraft, run by the United States Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories Ice-Free Land Program and US Geological Survey. Subsequently, the first dedicated caving expedition to northeast Greenland took the form of a four-man land-based team in 1983. The next dedicated caving expeditions to the area were those of the Greenland Caves Project in 2015 and 2019, though there were attempts to locate a new cave region at Lat: +70° in 2018. In this report, the caving expeditions are put into context of the history of exploration in northeast Greenland, from the beginning – with the pre-Inuit people – to the present day.