Miscellany

OTHER REFERENCES TO THULE

• Thule lends its name to the 69th element in the periodic table, Thulium.
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• A municipality in northern Greenland (Avannaa) was formerly named Thule after the mythical place. The Thule People, a paleo-Eskimo culture and a predecessor of modern Inuit Greenlanders, were named after the Thule region.
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• In 1953, the Northern Greenland community of Thule became Thule Air Base, operated by United States Air Force. The population was forced to resettle to Qaanaaq, 67 miles to the north (76°31′50.21″N 68°42′36.13″W only 840 NM from the North Pole).
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• Southern Thule is a collection of the three southernmost islands in the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, one of which is called Thule Island. The island group is overseas territory of the United Kingdom and uninhabited.
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• The Scottish Gaelic for Iceland is “Innis Tile”, which means literally the “Isle of Thule.”
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• Scientists of Germany’s “Institut of Geodesy and Geoinformation technique” of the Technical University of Berlin were testing the antique maps of Ptolemy and recognized a pattern of calculation mistakes which occurred if one tried to convert the old coordinates from Ptolemy into modern carthographical maps. After correcting for the mistakes, the scientists mapped Ptolemy’s Thule to the Norwegian island Smøla.
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• Ultima Thule was the title of a 1929 novel by Henry Handel Richardson, set in colonial Australia.
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• Ultima Thule is also the name of a location in the Mammoth Cave system. It was formerly the terminus of the known-explorable southeastern (upstream) end of the passage called “Main Cave,” before discoveries made in 1908 by Ed Bishop and Max Kaemper showed an area accessible beyond it, now the location of the Violet City Entrance. The Violet City Lantern tour offered at the cave passes through Ultima Thule near the conclusion of the route.