An Island That's Living Up to Its Name

Back to Nature

The size of Greenland necessitates some choices for a traveler setting his own itinerary. There are no roads outside the towns, so the options for movement are plane, boat or dog sled.

Air Greenland's flight lands at Kangerlussuaq, a former U.S. air base with a long runway. There is little to keep one in "Kanger," as it is called, except the short drive out to the ice cap or a tour of nearby musk ox herds.

Back in a plane, flying north from there, you can find the icy essence of Greenland: majestic icebergs, snow adventures, arctic camping in an area so stunning it is designated a World Heritage Site. Or, flying south, you can plumb the Viking ruins and experience the culture in picturesque villages connected by ferries or helicopters.

In either direction, the star attraction is nature. On a walk in southern Greenland through the sheep farms resurging in a warmer climate, 41-year-old Kenneth Hoegh, whose ancestors came here 200 years ago from Denmark, described the lure:

"Have you ever heard the silence?" he asked me. "My brother-in-law was fishing with me here in Greenland, and suddenly he said to me, 'Kenneth, can you hear the silence?' There was not a word. No bird singing, no nothing. You could hear the air in your ears.

"I don't think many people in North America have experienced that silence."

Hoegh and many other Greenlanders are welcoming global warming, which is extending the short summer grazing season, making fatter animals for the island's 51 sheep farmers, and encouraging attempts to grow potatoes and other vegetables. An agricultural consultant, Hoegh thinks travelers would be intrigued by a visit to a working farm in the Arctic. It offers a glimpse at an isolated, honed-down existence.

"This is what it must have been like for American settlers," said Pia Rolsted Anderson, 51, working on her family's farm near Brattahlid, where Erik the Red settled. "It's hard work on a farm here. But there is freedom."

As she talked on the wooden walkway of the sheep shed, she kept an eye on the ewes. It was lambing season, and every hour a new lamb would emerge on the straw of the pens. For Anderson and her family, that meant shifts around the clock to oversee the births, helping if needed and ensuring that the newborns could breathe and struggle to their feet.

"What we have here is fresh air, healthy food, unpolluted water, and it's peaceful," said Anderson, a trained teacher who admits she has never been able to stray long from the farm.

Back to the Past?

The Viking ruins scattered over southern Greenland embrace both religion and mystery. Erik the Red's mother and son -- Leif Erikson, who sailed even farther west to America in 1000 -- established the first Christian church here. But the disappearance of the Norsemen sometime after 1408 has puzzled historians. Several theories are offered: conflicts with the Inuit, interruptions in the supply route to Europe that brought them goods in return for polar bear hides and narwhal tusks, even the lack of a Catholic bishop.

But the most widely accepted theory is that the Vikings left because of climate change, a sharp cooling called the Little Ice Age that made their tenuous farming a lost cause. In reverse, the climate changes occurring here now are a boon to humans but a threat to nature -- to the polar bears and seals that depend on the ice, and the fish and reindeer that have adapted to a cold climate. Scientists say those changes are happening fastest in the Arctic.