Greatest Places Physical Geography: Dr. Cecil Keen, July 1997 Greenland Geographic Description: Harsh, forbidding, and almost completely buried beneath a cap of permanent ice and snow, Greenland is the world's largest island. From north to south it is 1,600 miles long, about equal to the distance between New York and Denver, while at its widest point it spans about 750 miles. Its total area (840,000 square miles) is more than three times the size of Texas. And its rugged coastline, deeply indented by fjords and inlets, totals some 25,000 miles, just about equal to the circumference of the Earth at the equator. Much of the great wedge-shaped island lies north of the Arctic Circle. (Its northern tip is less than 500 miles from the North Pole.) In this frigid Arctic environment, approximately 85 percent of the island's surface is covered by a permanent ice cap. Averaging 5,000 feet in thickness, the ice cap in some places is as much as 14,000 feet thick and includes about 10 percent of all the ice in the world. Only a relatively narrow coastal strip and scattered nunataks (isolated mountain peaks that project above the surrounding ice) are free of permanent cover of ice and snow. The Greenland ice cap, in fact, is the second largest in the world, exceeded only by the massive ice cap that covers Antarctica.
The bedrock beneath the ice is an eastern extension of the Canadian Shield, the expanse of ancient granite rock that makes up much of Canada's vast interior lowland plain. The surface of the bedrock is far from even. In some places it lies below sea level, while elsewhere it rises up to form high mountain ranges. (The highest peak in Greenland, Mount Gunnbjorn in the eastern coastal range, reaches 12,139 feet.) In overall contours the land surface beneath the ice is more or less saucer-shaped, with a central depression bordered by mountain ranges. | |
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