Greenland is more than a sheet of ice on a map. These facts explore its isolated towns, survival stories, hidden landscapes, strange history, and the people who have lived at the edge of the world for centuries.
Nuuk Just North Of Reykjavik
1. Nuuk, Greenland is the northernmost capital in the world, situated just a few kilometers farther north than Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland.
2. Greenland has only one university, staffed by 14 people and enrolling 205 students as of November 2020. Its size is small because the government pays for students to receive free university education anywhere in Europe or North America.
3. At a prison in Nuuk, Greenland, some inmates reportedly keep the keys to their own cells so they can have privacy, and others may leave the premises during the day to go to work or school. Surprisingly, inmates are even allowed to go hunting with rifles to shoot birds and seals.
4. Moriusaq, Greenland had a population of three in 2009. A case of self-defense reduced the population to two, a father and his son, and as of November 2020 the population is zero.
5. Ivittuut and Kangilinnguit are the only two cities in Greenland connected by a road.
6. The Qinngua Valley, also called Paradise Valley, may have the mildest climate in Greenland. It contains the island’s only true forest and more than 300 species of plants. It also includes an abandoned Viking farm that may be Brattahlid, the estate founded by Eric the Red, whose son Leif Erikson set foot on North America approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus.
7. In 1123 the people of Greenland asked King Sigurd of Norway to send them a bishop, and they presented a polar bear as a gift to accompany their request.
8. Greenland, Ireland, New Zealand, and Iceland share one thing in common: none of them have a snake population.
9. For centuries the Inuit people of northern Greenland used metal knives and tools despite having no mines or smelting. They used enormous iron meteorites for their metal, which American explorer Robert E. Peary ultimately stole.
10. In the 12th century Greenland was inhabited by three distinct ethnic groups: the Inuit, the Dorset people, and the Norse Greenlanders. By the end of the 15th century, only the Inuit remained.
Vast Park Teeming With Life
11. Northeast Greenland National Park is larger than Pakistan, Venezuela, or France, and only 30 countries are larger than it. There are abundant polar bears, hares, foxes, caribou, and walruses, as well as almost half the world’s population of musk oxen, about 15,000 head.
12. Beneath Greenland’s ice lies a Grand Canyon carved by ancient floods, with ancient topography hidden under the white expanse.
13. Greenland is not among the ten largest countries by area. It appears much larger because its location near the North Pole causes it to be visually stretched when shown on a flat map.
14. If all of Greenland’s ice melted, local sea level would actually drop because the loss of the ice’s mass would reduce the local gravitational pull that the ice originally created.
15. One reason Greenland is considered the largest island while Australia is treated as a continent, even though Australia fits the definition of an island by being completely surrounded by water, is that Greenland lies on the North American tectonic plate and Australia sits on its own separate tectonic plate.
16. Infrasound station IS18, located in Qaanaaq, Greenland, is a highly specialized sensor array used to detect atomic blasts and earthquakes, and to monitor the human heart in ballistocardiography.
17. In 1982 the people of Greenland voted to leave the European Union; they did so in 1985 and remain not part of it today.
18. Jonathan Motzfeldt, Greenland’s first Prime Minister, at one point consolidated near-absolute power through political purges that sidelined former comrades. He led the government for almost twelve years until a drinking problem forced him to resign and leave politics.
19. Greenlandic, the Inuit/Eskimo-Aleut language of Greenland, is polysynthetic, meaning that it uses stems and many suffixes to make long words where we would have a multi-word sentence: “Aliikusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli” means “‘However, they’ll say that he’s a great entertainer, but..'”
20. Piblokto is a culture-bound syndrome in Greenland in which sufferers withdraw into a dissociative state during which they may commit dangerous acts and then recover with no memory of the occurrence. It is more likely to affect Inuit women and happens largely during winter.
Warehouse Museum Of Mummies
21. The Greenland National Museum is housed in a former warehouse and holds the Qilakitsoq mummies. Those mummies are three women and a six-month-old child, making up half of the mummies discovered at Qilakitsoq.
22. The names of Greenland’s territories translate as ‘much ice’, ‘center’, ‘south’ and ‘darkness’.
23. A building known as Blok P once accommodated 1% of Greenland’s population. It was advertised to tourists as ‘so depressing that it’s almost an attraction in itself.’
24. Greenland was named Greenland because Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland, chose a more attractive name than Iceland to entice settlers.
25. In the winter of 1942 in Greenland, bad weather caused a plane to crash-land. During subsequent rescue attempts six aircraft also crashed, and survivors sheltered on a glacier for as long as 5.5 months awaiting help.
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