Things We Love About Greenland

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ice

When viewed from the Mercator projection, it dwarfs Australia, and Western Europe appears almost as big as Africa.

It has amazing fossil beds

+ Permafrost;
+ Tundra;
+ The Greenland Ice Cap;
+ It's called "Greenland" yet most of it is white - althought in summer the south can be quite green;
+ It's Danish;
+ There are permanent residents there, despite the harshness of the weather;
+ The Vikings paid a visit.

more ice!

Penguins are cute!

It has the word, Green in it.

"I may be stuck in the 50s and 60s, but the Internet reminds me that it's 2006."
-->CockneyRebel

The place names!

Being as obsessed with maps as I was from a very young age, I grew up as a small kid with Greenland having placenames which were Danish, and thus relatively pronounceable.

As I got into my teens, Greenland had had Home Rule (from Denmark) for a few years, and this suddenly changed the map of Greenland as atlases now had Inuit place names instead of Danish ones. This really caught my attention and intrigued me.

Having a world map on my wall, where Greenland was suddenly referred to by the more alien looking name of Kalaallit Nunaat, was a starter for ten.

Then, as I thumbed through atlases in geography lessons in high school, a whole new weird world opened up before me. I'd been used to, and comfortable with, Danish names such as Sondre Stromfjord which became Kangerlussuaq; Thule which became Qaanaaq; and my favourite, Scoresbysund became Ittoqqortoormiut!

All very weird looking names. Such place names were actually slightly scary to me. It did however shed a whole new intriguing and charming light on Greenland.

Going off topic, I had a similar experience with Spain, as well as other countries through time. For example Spain had recently come out of dictatorship, and new and wonderful Catalan and Basque place names started appearing in atlases, which along with the languages were still all but banned from use when I was very young.

The fact that the name was meant to get people to come, one of the first cases of false advertizing!

does anyone know why greenland looks so big on maps? in reality austraila is alot bigger i think

Stinking frozen fish sticks again mom

fish sticks

The Inuits!

In their language they:

don't have a word for "war"

have 20-30 words for snow

can only count to ten, over ten they count in danish

They always laugh a lot!

Its a tough environment. I expect the people to be very tough and resilient. Not even the vikings could stay.

I like all scandanavians.