The Americans have the Pituffik Space Base (pronounced Bee-doo-FEEK) in northwestern Greenland. Its 150 personnel run missile defense and space surveillance. Its location at the top of the globe, not far from the North Pole, allows its radar to detect missiles in their earliest moments of flight.

Rising Arctic temperatures are reshaping the geopolitics of the far North. As ice retreats fromGreenland’s interior, dormant military legacies are surfacing, revealing not only forgotten infrastructure but potentially hazardous waste.

While few details of the exact work at Pituffik have been made public, the improvements come during a time of intense focus on Greenland.

At its height, the United States operated 50 military installations in Greenland—and once had fantastical plans for an elaborate nuclear missile network underneath its ice.

President Donald Trump's insistence that the U.S. will acquire Greenland "whether they like it or not" is just the latest chapter in a co-dependent and often complicated relationship between America and the Arctic's largest island—one that stretches back more than a century.

The Pentagon says the $1.5 billion potential sale "would not alter the regional military balance."

Last year in June, Tehran launched missile strikes against a US base in Qatar after vowing to retaliate when US forces directly attacked Iran’s three main nuclear sites following weeks of threats by Trump. US officials said the missiles had been successfully intercepted and no casualties were reported.