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Greenland
The world's largest island, a vast ice-sheet realm in the Arctic
The largest island on Earth is, paradoxically, almost entirely uninhabitable. Greenland sprawls across more than two million square kilometres, yet roughly four-fifths of it lies buried beneath an ice sheet up to three kilometres thick, a frozen plateau so heavy it has pressed the centre of the island below sea level. Only a thin coastal fringe is free of ice, and there, in scattered settlements between fjords and glaciers, fewer than sixty thousand people live in one of the most remote inhabited places in the world.
Greenland covers about 2,166,000 square kilometres, more than three times the size of the next-largest island. Geologically it is part of the North American continent, sharing ancient bedrock among the oldest on the planet. Its defining feature is the Greenland Ice Sheet, the second-largest mass of ice on Earth after Antarctica, holding enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by about seven metres were it all to melt. Around its rim, glaciers calve icebergs into the sea, the coast is gashed by enormous fjords, and the highest point, Gunnbjorn Fjeld in the east, rises to about 3,694 metres as a nunatak piercing the ice.
Greenland has been home to Inuit peoples for millennia, and Norse settlers under Erik the Red arrived around 985 CE before vanishing centuries later. Today it is an autonomous territory of Denmark with growing aspirations to independence, its Inuit-majority population governing its own affairs while the world's powers eye its strategic Arctic position and untapped minerals. Climate change has thrust the island into global headlines, as accelerating ice loss makes Greenland both a bellwether of planetary warming and, unsettlingly, a frontier newly opening to mining and shipping.