Greenland
a large island lying between North America and Europe, almost wholly within the Arctic Circle. Its greatest breadth, east and west, is 690 miles. Its length in a north and south direction is as yet unknown. Its area certainly exceeds half a million square miles. Greenland is an unusually mountainous country. The peaks on the western coast are from 5,000 to 6,000 feet high, while those on the eastern side run still higher, the greatest known elevation being Petermann Peak, estimated at 11,000 feet, nearly twice the height of Mt. Washington. The interior of Greenland is a rounded mass of glacial snow and ice, beneath which it is impossible to say what exists. The ice-cap rises high enough to conceal lofty mountains. The Antarctic ice-cap is considered the largest mass of ice in the world. That of Greenland ranks second. There is ice enough in Greenland to cover the entire United States one-fourth of a mile deep. Around the coast, bare strips escape from the ice. The widest extends along the western coast, and is from sixty to one hundred miles broad. The coast shows everywhere signs of subsidence. It is worn by glaciers into inlets comparable to those of the Alaskan coast. In fact, the fiords of Greenland surpass even those of Norway in magnitude. One of the largest is 160 miles long. Many are still filled with glaciers whose ends are 1,000 or even 2,000 feet thick. The Upernavik glacier creeps seaward in summer at a rate of ninety-nine feet per day, the highest rate of glacial advance known. In addition to the enormous discharge of ice into the sea, still greater quantities of water find their way under and through the ice in subglacial rivers.
The island belongs to Denmark. A few hundred Danes live in the several villages and administer affairs. Upernavik is the most northerly inhabited village in the world. About 10,000 Eskimos hunt, trap, and fish, Indian fashion, and trade with the Danes. The Eskimos are expert in the use of snowshoes, dog sleds, and canoes. They live in tents in summer and in stone huts in winter, or, failing the latter, they are skillful in the construction of snow huts of a beehive or dome shape. Settlements are confined to the valleys on the coast.
Commerce is a government monopoly. No private person is allowed to ship goods in or out. Eider down, game, a kind of stone called cryolite, fish and fish products,--the exports amount to perhaps a fourth or a half a million dollars a year. Groceries, clothing, ammunition, and the like are imported to an equal amount.
The western coast is warmer than the eastern, as a warm ocean current runs up the western side while a cold Arctic current follows the eastern shore southward. The interior of Greenland is one of the coldest spots known, twenty degrees colder than the Arctic Ocean.