After spending 1950-51 with an isolated group of Eskimos in northern Greenland, sharing their life on the very edge of survival, Jean Malaurie returned with his companions to Thule village to find a U.S. airbase under construction: "Men who lived by the harpoon found themselves in the atomic age." When Malaurie traveled back to the Arctic in 1972, the airbase had irreversably transformed the Eskimo (Inuit) culture.