Point McIntyre is a low spit of land at the western entrance to Prudhoe Bay, on Stefansson Sound along the Beaufort Sea coast of the Arctic Ocean, about 196 miles (316 km) southeast of Utqiagvik and 120 miles (194 km) west of Kaktovik, Alaska. Ernest de Koven Leffingwell named the point for Samuel “Scotty” McIntyre, who worked with him for three years. Between 1906 and 1914 Leffingwell produced the first accurate maps of much of Alaska’s Arctic coastline.

In 1955 the US Air Force built an airstrip about 2 miles (3.2 km) west of the point to support construction and operation of a Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar station, designated POW-C. Point McIntyre Airport served the Air Force exclusively until the station closed in 1963. Largely abandoned afterward, the runway saw occasional use by aircraft supporting oil-industry exploration and drilling.

In March 1988 geologists discovered the Point McIntyre oil field, with the ARCO-Exxon Point McIntyre No. 3 well, by re-evaluating existing drilling-log data. Earlier wells in the area had been abandoned, and interest waned until careful re-mapping revealed the field’s hydrocarbon potential. The reservoir lies in the early Cretaceous Kemik sand, trapped on the low side of a large fault splaying off the Prudhoe Bay Fault. The discovery well sustained a flow rate of more than 2,500 barrels of oil a day. By 2009 the field had produced over 415m barrels and was still yielding about 800,000 barrels a month from 46 wells. Read more here and here. Explore more of Point McIntyre and Stefansson Sound here: