Advisory Scientific Commission

The Advisory Scientific Commission is a research body established in 1967 as the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark sought new deposits to offset the depletion and declining quality of Greenland’s cryolite ore. It expanded the scale and secrecy of the corporation’s research, while its funding of later expeditions became a crucial thread in Smilla’s investigation of what happened at Gela Alta.

Formation and remit

As the cryolite reserves neared exhaustion, the corporation expanded its laboratory staff from five people to twenty and created a permanent research group. It had previously hired additional geologists for short periods, often from Finland; the new group marked a more sustained effort to find deposits. The Commission was formed in 1967 for that purpose, amid rumors of new finds that repeatedly circulated among employees and were then denied.

Membership and growing secrecy

The Commission brought together representatives of major companies and institutions that worked with the corporation, including the Swedish Diamond Drilling Company, Denmark’s Underground, Inc., the Geologic Institute, and Greenland’s Geologic Survey. Its formation made daily work more secretive, and employees were told little about its activities. The new body also complicated the corporation’s bookkeeping: more fees and expedition expenses meant more complicated accounts, while a longstanding discrepancy of 115,000 kroner remained unresolved in the memory of former chief accountant Elsa Lübing.

The Gela Alta accounts

The Commission’s role becomes especially significant through an audit Elsa carried out shortly before retiring in 1992. On January 7, exactly twenty-five years after the earlier event she had been tracking, she compared the books for the previous summer’s Gela Alta expedition with the old accounts. Although the 1991 expedition was financed through the Commission, she found the records could still be compared. The largest 1991 entry was 450,000 kroner, so she called the Commission and requested an itemization.

Elsa was later reprimanded in a letter for going over her immediate superiors’ heads. But the telephone response had already disclosed the crucial detail: the 450,000 kroner paid to charter a ship. When Smilla later asked who had paid that sum, Elsa identified Geoinfarm, a company with two representatives on the Commission and, as she recalled, a five-percent shareholding registered with the Trade Commission. The Commission thus appears in the narrative both as a research institution and as a channel through which expedition funds could pass, linking scientific exploration to corporate and financial arrangements that Smilla is trying to uncover.