This Week’s Fun Facts: The Mysteries of Greenland Revealed

Some things you may not know about Greenland

It’s drifting west, literally.
Greenland sits on the North American tectonic plate and moves about 2–3 centimeters west each year. Tiny, but measurable with GPS.

There are no roads between towns.
You can’t drive from one city to another. Travel happens by boat, plane, helicopter, snowmobile, or dogsled depending on the season.

Greenland has its own name, and it’s not Danish.
In the local Inuit language, the country is called Kalaallit Nunaat, meaning “Land of the People.”

Ice hides a canyon bigger than the Grand Canyon.
Beneath the ice sheet lies a massive canyon system over 750 km long, discovered using radar. It was completely unknown until 2013.

Time works differently near the Arctic Circle.
Parts of Greenland experience months of nonstop daylight in summer and months of darkness in winter with no sunrise or sunset at all.

Most people live on a thin coastal strip.
About 80% of Greenland is covered by ice, so nearly the entire population lives along the coast—often wedged between mountains and sea.

Greenlandic words can be very long.
The Greenlandic language (Kalaallisut) is polysynthetic, meaning entire sentences can be packed into a single word.