Hello from the Northern Hemisphere

Day 10: Greenland

This morning we reached Greenland, and sailed into Scoresbysund, the world’s longest fjord system.

The fjord stretches up to 350 kms from the Greenland sea, and is like sailing through iceberg alley.

We took a zodiac cruise among the icebergs and here’s a selection of them.

Also saw a beautiful waterfall, gushing down the mountain from the glacier at the top.

And the little auk paid a visit ( disclaimer: these photos are from a real photographer.)

As you can see, it’s rainy and overcast and as the fog came in, it was incredibly eerie.

Greenland has an interesting history. It’s part of Denmark and was originally populated by the Inuit people (of which there are different tribes and different languages). The famous Norse explorer, Erik the Red (so called because of the colour of his hair and beard) founded the first European settlement in Greenland in 980. He purposely called it “Greenland” to make it sound more attractive than “Iceland” and he successfully marketed it to a large number of colonists who moved there in 985. The Norse thrived in Greenland for 4-5 centuries but then disappeared. (One of the speculated reasons for this is that the Norse traded on walrus ivory, but elephant ivory became more competitive).

Greenland’s colonial status ended in 1953. Denmark’s strategy was to make it more Danish. Denmark introduced urbanisation and closed down towns and forced people from numerous villages into 4 main towns, with huge apartment blocks. They forbad the Greenlandic language , and Greenlanders had to learn Danish. Over time, this led to problems like loss of culture, language, isolation etc.

This spawned a political movement, spearheaded by a rock band called Sume. Eventually this resulted in Greenland securing self rule in 2009. There are ambitions for independence but Greenland relies on a substantial annual grant from Denmark so they need to find income to replace that funding source. Apparently King Frederick and Queen Mary visited there last week!

Greenland is described as “the world’s largest island” by a variety of encyclopaedias. But, hang on, Australia is 4 x the size of Greenland…..
So does Australia’s status as a continent negate the fact that it is “a piece of land surrounded by water” (which is the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of an island).

If so, why? There is no formula which can be applied which will show Australia to be the largest island. Either we exclude continental land masses, which results in Greenland winning the accolade with Australia as a non-starter; or we include the continents, whereby Australia comes in a poor third behind Europe/Asia and the Americas. Both of these significant land masses are of course “pieces of land surrounded by water.”

Get it? Got it? Good.

By the way, it seems we get just under two hours of darkness today

and here’s today’s coffee design