Greenland: The Ice Island

An island of edges

Greenland is the largest island on Earth, and about four-fifths of it is a permanent ice sheet up to three kilometres thick. People live only on the ice-free coastal fringe — around 57,000 of them, nine in ten Greenlandic Inuit, the Kalaallit. It is geographically part of North America, politically part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and in 1985 it left the European Community over fishing rules. It has had self-rule since 2009, with a legal path to full independence whenever its people choose to take it.

A short history

1. c. 2500 BCE

   First peoples

   Palaeo-Eskimo cultures arrive from Arctic Canada.

2. c. 985 CE

   Erik the Red

   Norse settlers from Iceland found colonies in the south-west.

3. c. 1200–1300

   The Thule migration

   The ancestors of today's Inuit arrive from the west.

4. 15th century

   The Norse vanish

   The Scandinavian settlements die out.

5. 1721

   Hans Egede

   A Danish-Norwegian mission colony is founded near today's Nuuk.

6. 1774

   The monopoly

   The Royal Greenland Trade closes the island to outsiders.

7. 1953

   County of Denmark

   Colonial status ends; intensive "Danization" follows.

8. 1979

   Home Rule

   Greenland gets its own parliament and government.

9. 2009

   Self-Government

   Expanded autonomy, resource rights, and a route to independence.

Waves of arrival

People reached Greenland in several distinct migrations from the Canadian Arctic — the Saqqaq and then the Dorset cultures — each of which appears to have died out or withdrawn.

The Norse came from the east. Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland, sailed west around 985 and gave the island its inviting name. Two settlements on the south-western fjords grew to a few thousand people, farming livestock and exporting walrus ivory, with a bishop's seat and stone churches. Norse Greenlanders reached North America around the year 1000.

Why the Norse vanished is still argued — a cooling climate, exhausted soils, the collapse of the ivory trade, isolation from Norway, friction with the Inuit. By the late 15th century they had disappeared.

The Thule, and the Danes

The ancestors of today's Greenlanders were a separate people: the Thule culture, who spread from Alaska across the Canadian Arctic and reached northern Greenland around 1200–1300, moving down both coasts with dog sleds, kayaks and harpoons. They overlapped the last of the Norse, and their descendants have lived in Greenland continuously ever since.

Denmark-Norway claimed Greenland as former Norse land, and in 1721 the missionary Hans Egede founded a colony near what became Godthåb (1728) — now Nuuk — hoping to find the lost Norse Christians. He found only Inuit, whom the mission set about converting. From 1774 a royal trade monopoly sealed the island off from the outside world for nearly two centuries.

Modernisation and its costs

When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, the United States took over Greenland's defence and supply, building airbases — including the far-northern Thule base in 1951, for which an Inuit village was forcibly relocated. Cryolite from Greenland was vital to wartime aluminium.

In 1953 Denmark ended Greenland's colonial status and made it an integral county. The modernisation policies that followed concentrated the scattered population into a few towns with Danish-style apartment blocks, built an industrial fishing economy, and made Danish the language of advancement — a wrenching social change, run largely by Danish officials. The same years saw a birth-control campaign that fitted contraceptive coils in thousands of Greenlandic women and girls, often without consent, now the subject of an official investigation and of formal apologies from the Danish and Greenlandic prime ministers.

Toward independence

A 1979 referendum brought Home Rule — a Greenlandic parliament and government running most domestic affairs, and a stronger place for the Greenlandic language, which became the sole official language in 2009. In 1982 Greenland voted to leave the European Community over fishing rights. The Self-Government Act of 2009, following another referendum, went further: it recognised the Greenlandic people under international law, transferred rights over underground resources, and set out how Greenland could become fully independent — which would end the Danish annual grant that funds a large share of the public budget.

The economy still rests on fishing and that subsidy. A melting ice sheet has drawn outside interest in Greenland's minerals and shipping routes, and renewed attention from the United States, which keeps a space and missile-warning base at Pituffik. The United States offered to buy the island in 1946, President Trump raised the idea again in 2019, and since 2025 his administration has sought American control of Greenland; the Danish and Greenlandic governments have refused, asserting Greenland's right to decide its own future. At the March 2025 election the opposition Democrats won the most seats, and Jens-Frederik Nielsen became premier. Independence, its pace and its economic cost remain the central questions of Greenlandic politics.

What Greenland carries

Greenland's history is a sequence of peoples meeting an unforgiving environment — some who did not last, one Norse colony that failed, and the Thule Inuit who endured and became a nation. The modern chapter is about undoing a colonial relationship on Greenlandic terms: enough self-rule to decide its own future, and a slow, deliberate approach to the moment it might.