Into the Great Emptiness : W.W. Norton and Company : 9781324086376 : 1324086378 : 30 Jan 2025 : By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed "Gino"), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level. The Ice Cap Station was to be the anchor of a transpolar route of air travel from Europe to North America. The weather on the ice cap was appalling. Fierce storms. Temperatures plunging lower than -45° Celsius in the winter. Watkins's scheme called for rotating teams of two men each to monitor the station for two months at a time. No one had ever tried to winter over in that hostile