North America Facts – Greenland – the country of snow, ices and icebergs. This island, the biggest in the world, lies on Arctic Ocean border and Antarctic oceans in only 740 km from the North Pole and always differed difficult weather. Greenland is a little populated, but here the real expanse for those who love boundless ice open spaces, floating ices and the Polar lights.
The biggest island in the world, Greenland really is almost completely covered with an ice cover. From two with superfluous thousand square kilometers of all area free from an ice armor there are only about 340 thousand. The cape Kap Morris Jesup being the most northern point of the island, at the same time is considered the closest slice of a land in the direction to the North Pole. Almost all the year round east and northern coasts of Greenland are surrounded with floating ices, only from the southwest of the coast of the island washes the warm West Greenland current which is driving away ice hummocks.
In spite of the fact that the ice armor covers about 80 % of all territory of the island, its name, meanwhile, is translated as В«The green countryВ». Such paradox is explained by very widespread legend that the first European who has opened these lands, came here with unique for navigation of the southwest party, and saw the green grass covering the coast. Historians do not undertake to argue that the legend is truthful, however a name of the first inhabitant of the old woman of Europe, reached the mysterious island, it is known. The Icelandic seaman Gunnbjorn who in 875 testified the respect to glaciers of Greenland became them. On the coast thus the seaman did not begin to descend, for it it the Norwegian Eric the Red, founded here made in 982 a colony.
Meanwhile, Europeans at all were not the first people, set foot on land Greenland. Long before them, in the 3rd millennium BC, here the Inuits (Eskimos) living on the Arctic islands of North America periodically began to reach. Inuits and make today the majority of inhabitants of Greenland (about 90 %). Other population – generally Danes as the island is independent unit of this country. Thus Greenland, in difference from Denmark, is not included into EU. Membership in the European community did not suit Greenland for one simple reason – officials tried to impose the quotas of catching of fish. For the island the main occupation on which for the majority of inhabitants is a catching of a halibut and a shrimp, restrictions on fishery seemed the unacceptable.
Greenland is very little populated, in the territory in 2 130 800 km2 there live about 58000 people. Generally life on the island is concentrated to the southwest coast washed by a warm current. There is also a main town of Greenland – Nuuk. To modern measures the capital at the independent territory the absolutely small – only about 16000 inhabitants. At the same time, the city exists any more one hundred years, it was founded in 1728 on a place of older settlements which age reaches till 4200 years.
