For even the hardiest of travelers, Greenland has long been terra incognita, a place unreachable in any casual sense—basically, off the map. Which is a bit ironic, because, for any map lover or just those with a healthy sense of global curiosity, it’s probably that classic world map that hung across the blackboard in most North American classrooms that spurred interest in this remote northern place. A hulking, mostly unsettled landmass stretching down from the furthest reaches of the north, most of Greenland is white, except for vibrant, verdant fringes around its edges.
Greenland is indeed a curious place. Significantly larger in size than many countries, including Mexico, it’s home to fewer than 60,000 people. But it looks even larger on a map, because of something called the Mercator Projection. Created in 1569 by a Flemish cartographer named Gerardus Mercator to aid navigation, this technique uses a linear scale that distorts the size of landmasses in increasing measure, the further away they are from the equator. And those near the poles? They look way bigger than their actual size.
For example: Alaska. On the Mercator map—which shapes our common understanding of how our world looks—the 49th state is roughly the same size as Australia, despite the fact the latter is more than four times larger. It’s even more pronounced with Greenland. With its extreme northerly location, the projection blows it up to about the same size as Africa. In reality, the world’s second-largest continent is 14 times bigger, and Greenland’s landmass matches just a single country there, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
That being said, Greenland is still very sizeable, and stands as the world’s largest island, covering more than 836,000 square miles. A self-governing territory within the Danish kingdom, it is also the most sparsely populated country on earth. But, with more than 80 percent of its surface covered in the world’s second-largest ice sheet, the question remains: is it green? That’s a surprisingly complicated question. On two visits there, including one this summer, I can answer: yes. Well, sort of.
