LARGEST ISLAND IN THE WORLD

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28222, 9 March 1957, Page 6

LARGEST ISLAND IN THE WORLD

Scientific Expeditions Now Active In Greenland

[By a Special Correspondent]

LONDON, February 2. MURDERER was the first man to explore Greenland, largest island in the world. He was an Icelandic Norwegian, who lived in the tenth century, and who was banished for a period of three years as a punishment for the crime he had committed. His name Eric —known as “the Red.”

It was this exiled Norseman from Iceland who named the new territory Greenland —which might seem an odd contradiction, considering that the greater part of Iceland throughout most of the year is more green in appearance than the frozen realm to which Eric the Red applied the term. Another Norwegian, Gunnbjorn, had actually sighted Greenland many years before Eric the Red set foot on it. It was Eric, however, who founded settlements there (in 986) at the head of several hundred colonists whom he brought from Iceland a year after he had completed his period of exile.

Danish Colony Since 1814

A Danish colony since 1814 (formally recognised as such by an international court of justice at The Hague in 1933 following a dispute between Norway- and Denmark), Greenland is still inhabited only in the coastal regions. With an area of more than 800,000 square miles it sustains a population of a mere 18,000 people, mainly Eskimos or persons of mixed European-Eskimo blood. There are some 500 individuals of pure Danish stock.

Away from the coastal regions. Greenland is locked under a vast ice cap. This forms a plateau covering three-quarters of the surface, a plateau varying in height between 6000 and 10.000 feet. The thickness of the ice is undoubtedly very great, and it is to measure its thickness by echosounding devices that a French expedition is now operating there.

Danish scientists, too, are planning to increase their knowledge of this huge land mass, by investigating glacial action, climatic changes. and other factors. They ' will also study the aurora borealis, that phenomenon which, as I know from my own experience, can appear in so many forms up there in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. Contrary to popular belief, the climate of Greenland is not unvaryingly harsh. On the coast in the summer time the weather can be comparatively warm and

sunny; even in winter, it is less cold than Siberia or some parts of Canada. In the high hinterland, of course, conditions are much more severe than along the coast.

Fossilised vegetation has been found which denotes that Greenland once enjoyed a sub-tropical climate—but that ' was 40,000,000 years ago. The early Norwegian settlers of Greenland traded in seal furs and walrus ivory, and established small farms, but their descendants became extinct early in the sixteenth century. A German expedition that went to Iceland in 1540 found only Eskimos there. It was considered that hostile Eskimos had wiped out the Norwegians, but excavations of their burial grounds have unearthed skeletons showing that they had degenerated in stature and that the incidence of death among children had latterly been very high—evidence which indicates that inter-breeding and poor conditions finally eliminated those small Norse colonies.

In latter years, cows and sheep have been reintroduced into Greenland, but- the Eskimo inhabitants still live principally by hunting, existing on seal meat and blubber, though they add to their diet such commodities as rice, sugar and coffee obtained from Danish trading-posts. Blubber, liver, skins and fish are exported. So is cryolite, a mineral used in the production of aluminium.