Greenland

Greenland is the great island between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, whose earlier Norse settlements had faded before Denmark-Norway re-established access to it in the early seventeenth century and asserted its sovereignty over the island. In 1721 a joint mercantile and clerical expedition led by the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede was sent to Greenland — sent, not knowing whether any Norse civilization remained there — beginning the colonization of the period shown on the map and a permanent Scandinavian presence that has lasted ever since. When Denmark and Norway separated in 1814, Greenland was transferred from the Norwegian to the Danish crown. The island was governed as a colony until the 1953 Constitution of Denmark ended that status and integrated Greenland fully into the Danish state; the 1979 home-rule referendum granted Greenland self-government within the kingdom. The capital, Nuuk, sits on the island's southwestern coast. Greenland remains an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, the world's largest island, its ice sheet covering most of its land and its population settled almost entirely along the ice-free coasts.