Despite the country having a substantial amount of potential oil deposits, the government has stated that the country has ceased further exploration in an effort to combat climate change and focus on sustainable development.
Greenland home rule arrived on May 1, 1979, after 70.1% of voters said yes to governing themselves. Copenhagen kept defense and foreign affairs, but Greenland gained its own parliament, control over schools and hospitals, and official status for Kalaallisut. After centuries of decisions made across the Atlantic, Greenlanders finally held the pen.
Nuuk began in 1728 as Godthåb, a Danish-Norwegian fort planted on ground Inuit and earlier peoples had called home for roughly 4,000 years. The early colony was brutal, and smallpox in the 1730s devastated the region. Today, renamed Nuuk in 1979, it stands as the world’s northernmost capital and one of its most Indigenous.
Around 1000 C.E., the Thule people began pushing east from the Bering Strait, and within roughly a century their descendants had reached Greenland. Traveling by dogsled and hunting bowhead whales from open boats, they carried a toolkit refined for the Arctic’s edge. Their journey seeded the Inuit world that stretches, unbroken, from Siberia to Greenland today.
Norse settlers reached southwestern Greenland in 986 C.E., when Erik the Red led roughly 14 ships from Iceland into a land of deep fjords and grasslands. Their farms at Brattahlíð raised cattle and barley, and served as the launch point for Leif Eriksson’s voyage to North America around the year 1000.
Erik the Red sailed west from Iceland around 985 C.E., leading 25 ships toward a coastline he’d shrewdly named Greenland to attract settlers. Only 14 ships completed the journey, but those who landed built farms, churches, and a legal assembly that endured nearly 500 years — and later became the launching point for Leif Erikson’s voyage to North America.
The Dorset culture thrived across the Canadian Arctic and Greenland for roughly 2,000 years, beginning around 500 B.C.E. They hunted seals at breathing holes in the sea ice, carved intricate miniature figures in bone and ivory, and developed the soapstone oil lamp still central to Arctic life today. A quietly remarkable chapter in the human story.
Greenland’s first settlers arrived around 4,500 years ago, when small bands of Paleo-Eskimo peoples crossed from Arctic Canada onto an island of ice and extreme cold. The Saqqaq settled the southwest while the Independence I culture pushed into the far north, apparently unaware of each other. Their arrival marks one of humanity’s farthest reaches into the inhabitable world.
