IS GREENLAND A GREEN LAND?

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 264, 7 November 1931, Page 3 (Supplement)

IS GREENLAND A GREEN LAND?

Never has any country been more inappropriately named than Greenland, which, should have heen called Iceland, for, except a narrow strip around its coast, it is a land buried under a vast, deep cap of ice which never melts away. Its little south-easterly neighbour, which lias the name of Iceland, deserves it far less than Greenland. Only about a fifth of Iceland is always under ice and snow. We can judge the comparative right of the two islands to "be named from their ice by noticing their sizes and the numbers of their people. Greenland is about 21 times as big as Iceland. But Iceland has seven times as many inhabitants as Greenland. There is. room for about 95,000 people to gain a living in Iceland between its coast and its central enowfields and glaciers. But the immensely larger Greenland only supports about 13,500 people, mostly fishermen. Iceland is very mountainous, but in Greenland the mountains are,covered up with an undulating field of ice, of a thickness that can only be guessed at. The elevation of the interior rises and gently falls between 6000 ft and 10,000 ft above sea-level. It is this great ice cap, creeping slowly towards the coasts, that breaks off at its edge when it reaches the sea and makes icebergs. But round its coasts even Greenland has a good deal of animal life, and this enables its people to live by hunting and fishing.