20 Super Cool Facts About Greenland That’ll Inspire You

Infrasound station IS18 located in Qaanaaq, Greenland is a highly specialized sensor array used to detect atomic blasts, earthquakes, and monitor the human heart in ballistocardiography.

Nuuk in Greenland is the world’s northernmost capital, located only a few kilometers further north than the Icelandic capital Reykjavik.

In 1123, the people of Greenland asked King Sigurd of Norway to send them a bishop along with a polar bear as a gift to accompany their request.

The Greenland National Museum is based in an old warehouse and contains the Qilakitsoq mummies. The mummies consist of three women and a six-month-old child, half of the mummies found at Qilakitsoq.

Greenland has four distinct Time Zones that cross its boundaries but the country is broken up into UTC0, UTC-1, UTC-3, and UTC-4. UTC-2 is only used during daylight savings. UTC0 is outside the country but the weather station Danmarkshavn is set to European time for ease of reporting.

Greenlandic, the Inuit/Eskimo-Aleut language of Greenland, is polysynthetic, meaning that it uses stems and many suffixes to make long words where we would have a multi-word sentence: "Aliikusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli" means "'However, they'll say that he's a great entertainer, but.."

Greenland isn’t even one of the top 10 largest countries by area. It just looks huge because it’s near the North Pole and gets visually stretched out when mapped on a flat surface.

Jonathan Motzfeldt, the first Prime Minister of Greenland once secured almost absolute power through a series of political purges, where old comrades were sidelined. He led the government for almost twelve years until he was forced to resign and leave politics because of a drinking problem.

Piblokto is a culture-bound Greenlandic syndrome in which sufferers withdraw into a dissociative state during which time they may commit dangerous acts, and recover with no memory of the occurrence. It is more likely to affect Inuit women and happens largely during winter.

Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world, with one in every four people attempting suicide at least once in their lives.