Greenland is the world’s biggest island, but it’s nowhere near as large as you might think. You can blame misconceptions about that on the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594).
Empirical proof that the Earth is spherical arrived in Spain in 1522 when the 40 survivors from Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition (not including its leader) came home after sailing west (plus south and then back north a few times) without ever heading east. That created a problem for map-makers, who effectively had to create a useful chart that somehow projected a round surface onto a flat square or rectangle.
Mercator’s solution was to keep all the lines of latitude and longitude straight and parallel. The benefit was that you could look at the map and see the relative position of each location. The disadvantage is that on a globe, the lines of latitude – equal on a Mercator projection – are in reality much longer at and near the equator than at the poles, so that while the positions may be accurate, the relative sizes are grossly distorted.
One result is that flat maps depict Greenland as being larger than Australia, which is actually about 3.5 times larger, and almost the size of Africa, which is 14 times larger. The Sahara Desert alone is about twice as big as Greenland, but you’d never know it from most flat maps.
Despite its size, Greenland is arguably the least-inhabited permanently populated place on the planet, assuming that Antarctica has a permanent population of zero, a claim contested by Argentina and Chile for dubious geopolitical reasons. Of Greenland’s 836,000 square miles, all but about 1% are taken up by an immense central ice sheet, mountains, permanently frozen fjords, and other wholly inaccessible pockets.
The island has about 56,000 residents, nearly 90% of whom live in 16 towns that hug the relatively milder southwest coast. That was where in about 986 CE the Vikings founded what eventually grew to about 500 farms. The last of them died out between 1450 and 1500, leaving the island to the Inuit, who still make up about 90% of its population.
Danish missionaries showed up in 1721 and established enough of a presence for what was then the combined kingdom of Denmark and Norway to lay claim. When those nations split in 1814, Denmark kept possession. That lasted until Denmark fell to Nazi Germany in April 1940.
For the first time, Greenland, became valuable real estate, something that takes us back to Gerardus Mercator and his maps. The shortest distance between two points on a globe isn’t a straight line on a flat map. Instead, it’s a “great circle” route, one that follows a circle whose center is also the center of the sphere on which that circle is drawn.
It’s why international flights from Hartford or Boston to London or Paris brush against Greenland and those from the West Coast to Europe tend to fly directly over it. It’s also why Allied convoys during World War II sailed close to Greenland, why Germany spent much of the war trying to establish clandestine weather stations there, and why, after Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. Coast Guard took charge of the island’s defense. Greenland’s substantial deposits of cryolite, a useful form of aluminum ore, didn’t hurt either.
After the war, the island returned to a newly liberated Denmark, which granted its inhabitants home rule in 1979 and complete self-rule in 2009. Over those years, substantial deposits of neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium (rare earth elements vital to modern electronics) were discovered.
Owning those resources would be nice, but the United States has no more claim to them than it has to Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn. Seizing Greenland, as has been repeatedly threatened, including as recently as last January, would be a random act of demented whimsy. Should the current administration carry out its threats, the best course for any subsequent administration would be to give the island back to its inhabitants immediately.
This article originally published at Editorial: Owning Greenland would be nice, but US has no claim to it.