1966 Gralata Expedition

The 1966 Gela Alta expedition was a failed attempt to reach and recover part of a meteorite on Gela Alta Island. Its careful preparations—a permanent passageway, rooms, and a planned saw for cutting the stone—were overtaken by the deaths of the Inuit divers, which changed the project into an improvised effort to account for a catastrophe. The expedition’s aftermath revealed an unexpected infection and became part of the buried history that Smilla confronts at the novel’s close.

Background and Return to Gela Alta

Loyen had first come to Gela Alta in the 1930s with a German expedition preparing for preliminary construction of an airport on a narrow strip of flat coastline on the island’s north side. The team brought Inuit from Thule; West Greenlanders had declined to join because of the island’s bad reputation. Following the method associated with Knud Rasmussen, Loyen took Inuit stories seriously and found the meteorite.

Loyen returned in 1966 with Ving and Andreas Fine Licht. They had not been able to solve the technical problems of reaching the stone during the earlier effort, so the expedition built a permanent passageway to it. In 1991, the group returned again, but that later expedition was forced to go home. The account of these successive efforts places the 1966 expedition between discovery and a later, still-unfinished return.

Preparations and the Divers’ Deaths

The 1966 team had identified the stone and constructed an entryway and underground rooms. The weather was favorable, and the expedition had time to work. Because the entire stone could not be brought back, the plan was to take a piece. Photographs showed the proposed cutting equipment: a hardened-steel band running over rollers. Loyen opposed using blowtorches to cut the meteorite.

The plan ended when the Inuit divers died as the saw was being positioned. Their deaths came forty-eight hours after their first dive and occurred almost simultaneously, within an hour of one another. The sudden loss of the divers overturned the expedition’s timetable and left the project failed, with time running short. The team improvised an account of the deaths as an accident. Loyen did not destroy the bodies; suspecting that something was wrong, he performed an autopsy once the group reached Nuuk.

The Infection and Its Aftermath

The autopsy disclosed an Arctic worm, a large roundworm ordinarily associated with sea mammals, including whales, seals, dolphins, and occasionally walruses. Its life cycle was understood, but it had not been known to infect people. Although infected meat was commonly eaten, especially by Inuit, the larva was normally recognized by the human immune system and destroyed. Its presence in the divers’ bodies therefore made the deaths more than a routine expedition accident.

Loyen had identified the parasite by chance: X-rays had been taken at the last minute to identify the bodies. The deaths thus produced an unexpected scientific finding, while the improvised accident explanation concealed the significance of what the autopsy showed. Decades later, equipment left in the rooms—laboratory instruments and an electrophoresis apparatus Loyen had brought in 1966 to separate and analyze proteins—remained under a layer of gray ice. The abandoned apparatus connects the expedition’s original search for an organic explanation to the investigation that uncovers its hidden history.

Narrative Significance

The expedition’s history is reconstructed during Smilla’s confrontation at Gela Alta, where Tørk recounts the earlier teams’ work and the deaths. This account gives the abandoned passageway and rooms a double meaning: they are remnants of a failed attempt to cut the meteorite and material evidence of the unexplained biological danger discovered afterward.

The 1966 expedition also marks the point at which technical confidence gives way to uncertainty. Its preparations had made the meteorite seem reachable, but the divers’ deaths abruptly changed the project’s purpose, and the parasite found in their bodies unsettled the assumptions behind the expedition. What remained was not a completed recovery but a hidden sequence of discovery, death, and concealment, preserved in the rooms and equipment beneath the ice.