 |
Map of Greenland pinpointing the locations where Dan Grossman will be travelling.
|
Greenland -- that big white patch at top of maps of the world
-- is a beautiful place. It is also an isolated country, with
relatively few inhabitants in an area more than half the size
of the United States. Despite its size, few Americans have
ever been there or even imagine going. Even if they wanted
to go, there are no commercial flights there from North America
to take them.
Daniel Grossman travelled to Greenland reporting back about
climate research on the ice, and about the island's wildlife,
people, and history.
Greenland was first settled several thousand years ago by
Inuit people who have occupied the island continuously ever
since. Nearly 90 percent of the island's 60,000 inhabitants
are Inuit or partly Inuit. The majority live in less than
a dozen small cities and towns; the rest are spread out over
the rocky rim of the ice-capped land.
Europeans discovered Greenland in the 10th century when Viking
Gunnbjorn Ulfsson was blown off course traveling from Norway
to Iceland. Erik the Red a Viking exiled from Iceland, later
founded two settlements on the windswept western coast land.
These Viking communities traded walrus tusks and hides, polar-bear
pelts, caribou skins and other exotic goods for metal implements
and wood for centuries with mainland Europe. However the far-flung
colonies became isolated in the 14th and 15th centuries and
mysteriously died out, leaving historians to puzzle over their
fate.
Denmark claimed sovereignty over Greenland in the 1600s, and
the island was a Danish colony until 1979 when Greenland officially
became an autonomous country. Greenland still remains closely
tied to Denmark, which, among other things, conducts much
of the scientific research on the Greenland Ice sheet and
along the country's eastern coast. The ice sheet, which occupies
85 percent of the island, is believed to have waxed and waned
for approximately 400,000 years. For the last four decades
Danish and American scientists have been learning about the
climate history of the North Hemisphere by drilling deep cores
from the center of the two-mile-thick ice. Ecologists are
studying the impact of global warming on the scrappy flora
and fauna of the inhospitable high arctic coast, where polar
bear prowl for seal, owls hunt for lemming, and walrus harvest
mussels.
Daniel Grossman travelled to Greenland by military transport
from Scotia, New York. He visited a research camp on the ice
sheet, just several hundred miles from the North Pole. He
wrote back from a bush camp where biologists are studying
the strange behaviors of lemmings and from a Danish ecological
research base in Greenland's North-East National Park, the
world's largest park. He visited the headquarters of the Sirius
Sledge Patrol, a police force that patrols remote territory
by dog sled. He also learned about Viking history at an archeological
dig in Iceland, where researchers unearthed a 1,000-year-old
farmstead.
Vikings | Inuit
| Wildlife
| Ice Cores
| Dispatches
| Teacher
Guides | Credits
© Copyright 2003, WBUR
|
