The North Warning System station at Barter Island is a long-range radar facility on the Beaufort Sea coast adjacent to the village of Kaktovik, about 273 miles (440 km) north-west of Inuvik, Northwest Territories, and 112 miles (180 km) east of Deadhorse, Alaska. The site is between Arey Lagoon to the west and Kaktovik Lagoon to the east. The Iñupiat name for the island is Nu-wu-ak, likely meaning “the place of barter”. In 1826 Sir John Franklin applied the name Barter Island to present-day Arey Island, which lies six miles (10 km) to the west. However, local usage transferred the name to this much larger island, and it has appeared on charts and topographic maps since 1912. Barter Island is one of the largest islands along Alaska’s Beaufort Sea coast, with 3,954 acres (1,600 ha) of tundra covering six to ten feet (2-3 m) of permafrost underlain by coastal-plain sediments. These sediments comprise reworked aeolian, alluvial, fluvial and marine deposits representing the Gubik Formation that developed during the Quaternary period (about 2.6 million years ago to the present). The radar facility sits on the island’s north shore, where steep bluffs consist of clay, sand and gravel interspersed with ice blocks and wedges. Barter Island’s north coast is changing rapidly as shorelines once anchored by permafrost and protected by sea ice now face the effects of climate change.

In 1914 the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson described an extensive Iñupiat-Inuit trade network stretching from the Bering Strait in the west to Copper Inuit country in the east, and possibly as far as Hudson Bay, Baffin Island and north-western Greenland. The most consistent trade item moving east was Siberian iron, exchanged for soapstone lamps and bowls moving west. Soapstone, a raw material mainly associated with the Canadian Shield, is not generally found in the western Arctic. In the eastern Arctic the near-exclusive use of soapstone for lamps and cooking pots dates to the beginning of the Thule period, about 1,000 years ago. Thule immigrants apparently abandoned the pottery of their Alaskan ancestors in favor of the more durable soapstone. From the Mackenzie Delta region, soapstone bowls were traded west via Barter Island to Point Barrow and Kotzebue Sound. By at least the late 18th century Russian metal goods, particularly iron knives, were the chief items the Copper Inuit received for their pots and lamps. By the mid-19th century, when consistent European contact began, most cooking pots and especially lamps from Kotzebue Sound to Cape Bathurst were made of Coronation Gulf soapstone. The trading site at Barter Island provided the crucial link between Alaskan Iñupiat and Mackenzie Inuit.

The North Warning System is a joint American and Canadian early-warning radar system that replaced the Distant Early Warning Line for the atmospheric air defence of North America. The Barter Island installation was the prototype for 21 stations built in Alaska and Canada during the Cold War. In 1947 the American military built a lighted runway 4,820 feet (1,469 m) long and an aircraft hangar. In 1951 the Air Force assumed control of the station, which became operational in 1953. Civilian contract workers operated the station until 1990, when it was upgraded with long-range surveillance radar and re-designated a Long-Range Radar Station as part of the North Warning System, now operated by the Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center based at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson. The North Warning System currently consists of 15 long-range radars: 11 in Canada and four in Alaska. The system also includes short-range radars in both countries. The North Warning System radars are integrated with the Alaska Radar System, which has 11 additional long-range radar sites. Read more here and here. Explore more of the North Warning System and Barter Island here: