Scientific Research in the Arctic: Greenland

Abstract

Greenland lies northeast of the North American continent and, with its eight to nine hundred thousand square miles, is the world's large island. Although the entire country is arctic in nature, conditions vary widely because, from north to south, almost 25 degrees of latitude are covered. The most striking feature of the island is the ice-cap - Indlandsisen - that covers about five-sixths of the total area and is more than ten thousand feet thick, leaving only a marginal zone around the coastline free of ice. This marginal zone is mountainous, and in some places rises to more than twelve thousand feet, so that Greenland actually is one big bowl of ice. There are cracks in the edge of that bowl through which glaciers flow all the way down to the sea, depositing icebergs in the ocean. Besides the icebergs there is a great deal of ocean ice around the coastlines of the island, especially on the east coast where the East Greenland Current brings the pack ice down from the northern polar basin, hampering navigation to a great extent. Greenland was discovered about four thousand years ago by people coming across the narrow straits from the Canadian archipelago. Ruins of their homes have been found, but no remains of the people themselves. It is believed that they must have been the forefathers of the present-day Eskimos. We know that since then many waves of Eskimos have moved back and forth across Greenland, so that even the thousands of miles of uninhabited coastline, some of which is the most northerly land in the world, have been inhabited at one time or another. About a thousand years ago Greenland was first sighted from the East by an Icelander by the name of Gunnbjorn, but the first European to set foot on the land was Erik the Red from Iceland. He had been expelled from Iceland for three years on account of a small incident of killing his neighbours, and he used those three years to investigate Greenland. He found out that this was a nice country to live in; that was why he call it Greenland. When the three years were up he went back to Iceland but soon returned to Greenland bringing with him people who settled on the southwest coast and established a farming community that existed for five hundred years. Erik's son, Leif, was actually the man who discovered America, in the year 1000, five hundred years before Christopher Columbus discovered the Bahama Islands. From those days originate the ties between Denmark and Greenland, and it is very important to note that Greenland as a part of Denmark is not an eighteenth-century colonial venture but a thousand-year-old historical fact. Even though the old Norsemen in Greenland died out around the year 1500 and even though connection was interrupted for a couple of hundred years, the Kings of Denmark never forgot that Greenland was part of their realm; and in 1721 a missionary, Hans Egede, was dispatched. From that year we date the modern history. The modern history of Greenland is about two hundred years of Danish endeavours to cope with the responsibilities this possession has put upon Denmark: above all, the social responsibilities, responsibilities of governing and supporting the 40,000 people who now live there, the descendants of the old Eskimos and the Danish settlers. But the Danish people also keenly feel their scientific responsibilities in Greenland, for although only one per cent of them live on this island that constitutes 98 per cent of the whole of Denmark, within that 98 per cent there are scientific problems of greater moment than in the European part of the nation. ...