Author Description

Greenland is indeed a fascinating place to visit. Granted, much of it consists of inaccessible Icefields that, if they melted, would detrimentally raise ocean levels to catastrophic levels. The coastal regions are, however, inhabited, and it is possible to fly in or take an adventuresome cruise with Linblad and visit the giant island. Three-quarters of Greenland lies above the Arctic Circle and ice bergs carved out of the many slowly-moving rivers of ice are commonplace in the North Atlantic. Due to sea ice, the notable attractions of the island tend to be concentrated in the southern third. The original settlers are not the Norse, but Inuit peoples who migrated eastwards from what is now Canada s northland. Although the area has been a Danish possession for centuries, only the relatively narrow Nares Strait separates it from Canada s Ellesmere Island, and the famous Thule Air Force base is considerably south of Alert, Nunavut. The second side of the sheet is a separate map of the entire North Polar Region, centred on the true North Pole itself. The Polar Region consists of everything north of the Arctic Circle, but this map extends the concept southward to the 55th parallel, thereby including all of Scandinavia, including Denmark, as well as all of northern Canada, northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and even Scotland, Estonia, and Latvia. A tiny portion of Ireland and a goodly chunk of Belarus also fall into the range of this map, which is very interesting, and is unique. No other such map exists. It was prepared by the Canada Map Office as a project and is used here with permission. Believe it or not, as a result, this map is copyright by the Queen, as are all government maps produced in Canada. I think that s a nice touch for an international map! Being a circular projection, the printing is from Canada at the bottom; thus, the place names for Russia and Scandinavia are oriented from the perspective of a wall map. In other words, nomenclature is consist